r-NRLF 


B    3 


BR 


LIBRARY 

OF  THE 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 

Class 


ft  I Ef      • 


THE      YOUNG      MAN      HAD      LEFT      HER.      SMILING,      LOOKING       BACK 


JULIA    BRIDE 


BY 

HENRY     JAMES 


ILLUSTRATED  BY 
W.  T.  SMEDLEY 


NEW    YORK   AND   LONDON 

HARPERS  BROTHERS  PUBLISHERS 

MCMIX 


Copyright,  1909,  by  HARPER  &  KROTHBRS. 

All  rights  reserved. 
Published  September,  1909. 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

THE   YOUNG  MAN   HAD  LEFT   HER,   SMILING,   LOOK 
ING    BACK Frontispiece 

"HE   SAYS  i  WAS  GOOD  TO   HIM,   MRS.   DRACK"    Facing  p.  46 
"THERE    NEVER    WAS    ANYTHING    THE     LEAST 

SERIOUS  BETWEEN  US" 56 

SHE  YIELDED  TO  THE  BITTERNESS 82 


19079' 


JULIA    BRIDE 


OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY 

OF 


JULIA    BRIDE 


had  walked  with  her  friend  to 
the  top  of  the  wide  steps  of  the 
Museum,  those  that  descended 
from  the  galleries  of  painting,  and 
then,  after  the  young  man  had 
left  her,  smiling,  looking  back,  waving  all 
gayly  and  expressively  his  hat  and  stick,  had 
watched  him,  smiling  too,  but  with  a  dif 
ferent  intensity — had  kept  him  in  sight  till 
he  passed  out  of  the  great  door.  She  might 
have  been  waiting  to  see  if  he  would  turn 
there  for  a  last  demonstration;  which  was 
exactly  what  he  did,  renewing  his  cordial 
gesture  and  with  his  look  of  glad  devotion, 


JULIA         BRIDE 

the  radiance  of  his  young  face,  reaching  her 
across  the  great  space,  as  she  felt,  in  un- 
diminished  truth.  Yes,  so  she  could  feel, 
and  she  remained  a  minute  even  after  he  was 
gone ;  she  gazed  at  the  empty  air  as  if  he  had 
filled  it  still,  asking  herself  what  more  she 
wanted  and  what,  if  it  didn't  signify  glad  de 
votion,  his  whole  air  could  have  represented. 
She  was  at  present  so  anxious  that  she 
could  wonder  if  he  stepped  and  smiled  like 
that  for  mere  relief  at  separation ;  yet  if  he 
desired  in  that  degree  to  break  the  spell 
and  escape  the  danger  why  did  he  keep 
coming  back  to  her,  and  why,  for  that  mat 
ter,  had  she  felt  safe  a  moment  before  in  let 
ting  him  go  ?  She  felt  safe,  felt  almost  reck 
less — that  was  the  proof — so  long  as  he  was 
with  her;  but  the  chill  came  as  soon  as  he 
had  gone,  when  she  took  the  measure,  in 
stantly,  of  all  she  yet  missed.  She  might 
now  have  been  taking  it  afresh,  by  the  testi 
mony  of  her  charming  clouded  eyes  and  of 
the  rigor  that  had  already  replaced  her  beau 
tiful  play  of  expression.  Her  radiance,  for 


JULIA         BRIDE 

the  minute,  had  "carried"  as  far  as  his, 
travelling  on  the  light  wings  of  her  brilliant 
prettiness — he,  on  his  side,  not  being  facially 
f  handsome,  but  only  sensitive,  clean  and 
eager.  Then,  with  its  extinction,  the  sus 
taining  wings  dropped  and  hung. 

She  wheeled  about,  however,  full  of  a  pur 
pose;  she  passed  back  through  the  pictured 
rooms,  for  it  pleased  her,  this  idea  of  a  talk 
with  Mr.  Pitman — as  much,  that  is,  as  any 
thing  could  please  a  young  person  so  troubled. 
It  happened  indeed  that  when  she  saw  him 
rise  at  sight  of  her  from  the  settee  where  he 
had  told  her  five  minutes  before  that  she 
would  find  him,  it  was  just  with  her  ner 
vousness  that  his  presence  seemed,  as  through 
an  odd  suggestion  of  help,  to  connect  itself. 
Nothing  truly  would  be  quite  so  odd  for  her 
case  as  aid  proceeding  from  Mr.  Pitman; 
unless  perhaps  the  oddity  would  be  even 
greater  for  himself — the  oddity  of  her  hav 
ing  taken  into  her  head  an  appeal  to  him. 

She  had  had  to  feel  alone  with  a  vengeance 
— inwardly  alone  and  miserably  alarmed — 
[3] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

to  be  ready  to  "meet,"  that  way,  at  the  first 
sign  from  him,  the  successor  to  her  dim  father 
in  her  dim  father's  lifetime,  the  second  of  her 
mother's  two  divorced  husbands.  It  made 
a  queer  relation  for  her;  a  relation  that 
struck  her  at  this  moment  as  less  edifying, 
less  natural  and  graceful  than  it  would  have 
been  even  for  her  remarkable  mother — and 
still  in  spite  of  this  parent's  third  marriage, 
her  union  with  Mr.  Connery,  from  whom  she 
was  informally  separated.  It  was  at  the 
back  of  Julia's  head  as  she  approached  Mr. 
Pitman,  or  it  was  at  least  somewhere  deep 
within  her  soul,  that  if  this  last  of  Mrs.  Con- 
nery's  withdrawals  from  the  matrimonial 
yoke  had  received  the  sanction  of  the  court 
(Julia  had  always  heard,  from  far  back,  so 
much  about  the  "Court")  she  herself,  as 
after  a  fashion,  in  that  event,  a  party  to  it, 
would  not  have  had  the  cheek  to  make  up— 
which  was  how  she  inwardly  phrased  what 
she  was  doing — to  the  long,  lean,  loose, 
slightly  cadaverous  gentleman  who  was  a 
memory,  for  her,  of  the  period  fn  m  her 

[4] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

twelfth  to  her  seventeenth  year.  She  had 
got  on  with  him,  perversely,  much  better 
than  her  mother  had,  and  the  bulging  misfit 
of  his  duck  waistcoat,  with  his  trick  of  swing 
ing  his  eye-glass,  at  the  end  of  an  extraor 
dinarily  long  string,  far  over  the  scene,  came 
back  to  her  as  positive  features  of  the  image 
of  her  remoter  youth.  Her  present  age— 
for  her  later  time  had  seen  so  many  things 
happen — gave  her  a  perspective. 

Fifty  things  came  up  as  she  stood  there 
before  him,  some  of  them  floating  in  from 
the  past,  others  hovering  with  freshness: 
how  she  used  to  dodge  the  rotary  movement 
made  by  his  pince-nez  while  he  always  awk 
wardly,  and  kindly,  and  often  funnily,  talked 
—it  had  once  hit  her  rather  badly  in  the  eye ; 
how  she  used  to  pull  down  and  straighten 
his  waistcoat,  making  it  set  a  little  better,  a 
thing  of  a  sort  her  mother  never  did;  how 
friendly  and  familiar  she  must  have  been 
with  him  for  that,  or  else  a  forward  little 
minx;  how  she  felt  almost  capable  of  doing 
it  again  now,  just  to  sound  the  right  note, 


JULIA         BRIDE 

and  how  sure  she  was  of  the  way  he  would 
take  it  if  she  did;  how  much  nicer  he  had 
clearly  been,  all  the  while,  poor  dear  man, 
than  his  wife  and  the  court  had  made  it  pos 
sible  for  him  publicly  to  appear;  how  much 
younger,  too,  he  now  looked,  in  spite  of  his 
rather  melancholy,  his  mildly-jaundiced,  hu 
morously  determined  sallowness  and  his  care 
less  assumption,  everywhere,  from  his  fore 
head  to  his  exposed  and  relaxed  blue  socks, 
almost  sky-blue,  as  in  past  days,  of  creases 
and  folds  and  furrows  that  would  have  been 
perhaps  tragic  if  they  hadn't  seemed  rather 
to  show,  like  his  whimsical  black  eyebrows, 
the  vague,  interrogative  arch. 

Of  course  he  wasn't  wretched  if  he  wasn't 
more  sure  of  his  wretchedness  than  that! 
Julia  Bride  would  have  been  sure — had  she 
been  through  what  she  supposed  he  had! 
With  his  thick,  loose  black  hair,  in  any  case, 
untouched  by  a  thread  of  gray,  and  his  kept 
gift  of  a  certain  big-boyish  awkwardness — 
that  of  his  taking  their  encounter,  for  in 
stance,  so  amusedly,  so  crudely,  though,  as 

[6] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

she  was  not  unaware,  so  eagerly  too — he  could 
by  no  means  have  been  so  little  his  wife's 
junior  as  it  had  been  that  lady's  habit,  after 
the  divorce,  to  represent  him.  Julia  had  re 
membered  him  as  old,  since  she  had  so  con 
stantly  thought  of  her  mother  as  old;  which 
Mrs.  Connery  was  indeed  now  —  for  her 
daughter  —  with  her  dozen  years  of  actual 
seniority  to  Mr.  Pitman  and  her  exquisite 
hair,  the  densest,  the  finest  tangle  of  ar 
ranged  silver  tendrils  that  had  ever  enhanced 
the  effect  of  a  preserved  complexion. 

Something  in  the  girl's  vision  of  her  quon 
dam  stepfather  as  still  comparatively  young 
— with  the  confusion,  the  immense  element 
of  rectification,  not  to  say  of  rank  disproof, 
that  it  introduced  into  Mrs.  Connery's  fa 
vorite  picture  of  her  own  injured  past — all 
this  worked,  even  at  the  moment,  to  quicken 
once  more  the  clearness  and  harshness  of 
judgment,  the  retrospective  disgust,  as  she 
might  have  called  it,  that  had  of  late  grown 
up  in  her,  the  sense  of  all  the  folly  and  vanity 
and  vulgarity,  the  lies,  the  perversities,  the 

[7] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

falsification  of  all  life  in  the  interest  of  who 
could  say  what  wretched  frivolity,  what  pre 
posterous  policy,  amid  which  she  had  been 
condemned  so  ignorantly,  so  pitifully  to  sit, 
to  walk,  to  grope,  to  flounder,  from  the  very 
dawn  of  her  consciousness.  Didn't  poor  Mr. 
Pitman  just  touch  the  sensitive  nerve  of  it 
when,  taking  her  in  with  his  facetious,  cau 
tious  eyes,  he  spoke  to  her,  right  out,  of  the 
old,  old  story,  the  everlasting  little  wonder 
of  her  beauty  ? 

"Why,  you  know,  you've  grown  up  so 
lovely — you're  the  prettiest  girl  I've  ever 
seen!"  Of  course  she  was  the  prettiest  girl 
he  had  ever  seen;  she  was  the  prettiest  girl 
people  much  more  privileged  than  he  had 
ever  seen;  since  when  hadn't  she  been  pass 
ing  for  the  prettiest  girl  any  one  had  ever 
seen  ?  She  had  lived  in  that,  from  far  back, 
from  year  to  year,  from  day  to  day  and  from 
hour  to  hour — she  had  lived  for  it  and  lit 
erally  by  it,  as  who  should  say ;  but  Mr.  Pit 
man  was  somehow  more  illuminating  than 
he  knew,  with  the  present  lurid  light  that 
[8] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

he  cast  upon  old  dates,  old  pleas,  old  values, 
and  old  mysteries,  not  to  call  them  old 
abysses:  it  had  rolled  over  her  in  a  swift 
wave,  with  the  very  sight  of  him,  that  her 
mother  couldn't  possibly  have  been  right 
about  him — as  about  what  in  the  world  had 
she  ever  been  right  ? — so  that  in  fact  he  was 
simply  offered  her  there  as  one  more  of  Mrs. 
Connery's  lies.  She  might  have  thought  she 
knew  them  all  by  this  time;  but  he  repre 
sented  for  her,  coming  in  just  as  he  did,  a 
fresh  discovery,  and  it  was  this  contribution 
of  freshness  that  made  her  somehow  feel  she 
liked  him.  It  was  she  herself  who,  for  so 
long,  with  her  retained  impression,  had  been 
right  about  him;  and  the  rectification  he 
represented  had  all  shone  out  of  him,  ten 
minutes  before,  on  his  catching  her  eye 
while  she  moved  through  the  room  with  Mr. 
French.  She  had  never  doubted  of  his  prob 
able  faults — which  her  mother  had  vividly 
depicted  as  the  basest  of  vices;  since  some 
of  them,  and  the  most  obvious  (not  the  vices, 
but  the  faults)  were  written  on  him  as  he 


JULIA         BRIDE 

stood  there:  notably,  for  instance,  the  exas 
perating  " business  slackness"  of  which  Mrs. 
Conner y  had,  before  the  tribunal,  made  so 
pathetically  much.  It  might  have  been, 
for  that  matter,  the  very  business  slackness 
that  affected  Julia  as  presenting  its  friendly 
breast,  in  the  form  of  a  cool  loose  sociability, 
to  her  own  actual  tension;  though  it  was 
also  true  for  her,  after  they  had  exchanged 
fifty  words,  that  he  had  as  well  his  inward 
fever  and  that,  if  he  was  perhaps  wondering 
what  was  so  particularly  the  matter  with 
her,  she  could  make  out  not  less  that  some 
thing  was  the  matter  with  him.  It  had  been 
vague,  yet  it  had  been  intense,  the  mute  re 
flection,  "  Yes,  I'm  going  to  like  him,  and 
he's  going  somehow  to  help  me!"  that  had 
directed  her  steps  so  straight  to  him.  She 
was  sure  even  then  of  this,  that  he  wouldn't 
put  .to  her  a  query  about  his  former  wife, 
that  he  took  to-day  no  grain  of  interest  in 
Mrs.  Connery;  that  his  interest,  such  as  it 
was — and  he  couldn't  look  quite  like  that, 
to  Julia  Bride's  expert  perception,  without 

[10] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

something   in   the   nature   of   a  new   one- 
would  be  a  thousand  times  different. 

It  was  as  a  value  of  disproof  that  his 
worth  meanwhile  so  rapidly  grew:  the  good 
sight  of  him,  the  good  sound  and  sense  of 
him,  such  as  they  were,  demolished  at  a 
stroke  so  blessedly  much  of  the  horrid  in 
convenience  of  the  past  that  she  thought  of 
him,  she  clutched  at  him,  for  a  general  saving 
use,  an  application  as  sanative,  as  redemptive 
as  some  universal  healing  wash,  precious 
even  to  the  point  of  perjury  if  perjury  should 
be  required.  That  was  the  terrible  thing, 
that  had  been  the  inward  pang  with  which 
she  watched  Basil  French  recede:  perjury 
would  have  to  come  in  somehow  and  some 
where — oh  so  quite  certainly! — before  the  so 
strange,  so  rare  young  man,  truly  smitten 
though  she  believed  him,  could  be  made  to 
rise  to  the  occasion,  before  her  measureless 
prize  could  be  assured.  It  was  present  to 
her,  it  had  been  present  a  hundred  times, 
that  if  there  had  only  been  some  one  to  (as 
it  were)  "deny  everything"  the  situation 
[n] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

might  yet  be  saved.  She  so  needed  some  one 
to  He  for  her — ah,  she  so  needed  some  one 
to  lie!  Her  mother's  version  of  everything, 
her  mother's  version  of  anything,  had  been 
at  the  best,  as  they  said,  discounted;  and  she 
herself  could  but  show,  of  course,  for  an  in 
terested  party,  however  much  she  might 
claim  to  be  none  the  less  a  decent  girl — to 
whatever  point,  that  is,  after  all  that  had 
both  remotely  and  recently  happened,  pre 
sumptions  of  anything  to  be  called  decency 
could  come  in. 

After  what  had  recently  happened — the 
two  or  three  indirect  but  so  wonying  ques 
tions  Mr.  French  had  put  to  her — it  would 
only  be  some  thoroughly  detached  friend  or 
witness  who  might  effectively  testify.  An 
odd  form  of  detachment  certainly  would 
reside,  for  Mr.  Pitman's  evidential  character, 
in  her  mother's  having  so  publicly  and  so 
brilliantly — though,  thank  the  powers,  all 
off  in  North  Dakota! — severed  their  con 
nection  with  him ;  and  yet  mightn't  it  do  her 
some  good,  even  if  the  harm  it  might  do  her 

[12] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

mother  were  so  little  ambiguous  ?  The  more 
her  mother  had  got  divorced — with  her 
dreadful  cheap-and-easy  second  performance 
in  that  line  and  her  present  extremity  of 
alienation  from  Mr.  Connery,  which  enfolded 
beyond  doubt  the  germ  of  a  third  petition  on 
one  side  or  the  other — the  more  her  mother 
had  distinguished  herself  in  the  field  of  folly 
the  worse  for  her  own  prospect  with  the 
Frenches,  whose  rninds  she  had  guessed  to 
be  accessible,  and  with  such  an  effect  of  dis 
simulated  suddenness,  to  some  insidious 
poison. 

It  was  very  unmistakable,  in  other  words, 
that  the  more  dismissed  and  detached  Mr. 
Pitman  should  have  come  to  appear,  the 
more  as  divorced,  or  at  least  as  divorcing,  his 
before-time  wife  would  by  the  same  stroke 
figure — so  that  it  was  here  poor  Julia  could 
but  lose  herself.  The  crazy  divorces  only, 
or  the  half-dozen  successive  and  still  crazier 
engagements  only  -  -  gathered  fruit,  bitter 
fruit,  of  her  own  incredibly  allowed,  her  own 
insanely  fostered  frivolity— either  of  these 
[13] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

two  groups  of  skeletons  at  the  banquet 
might  singly  be  dealt  with ;  but  the  combina 
tion,  the  fact  of  each  party's  having  been  so 
mixed-up  with  whatever  was  least  present 
able  for  the  other,  the  fact  of  their  having 
so  shockingly  amused  themselves  together, 
made  all  present  steering  resemble  the  classic 
middle  course  between  Scylla  and  Charybdis. 
It  was  not,  however,  that  she  felt  wholly 
a  fool  in  having  obeyed  this  impulse  to  pick 
up  again  her  kind  old  friend.  She  at  least 
had  never  divorced  him,  and  her  horrid  little 
filial  evidence  in  court  had  been  but  the 
chatter  of  a  parrakeet,  of  precocious  plumage 
and  croak,  repeating  words  earnestly  taught 
her  and  that  she  could  scarce  even  pro 
nounce.  Therefore,  as  far  as  steering  went, 
he  must  for  the  hour  take  a  hand.  She 
might  actually  have  wished  in  fact  that  he 
shouldn't  now  have  seemed  so  tremendously 
struck  with  her;  since  it  was  an  extraor 
dinary  situation  for  a  girl,  this  crisis  of  her 
fortune,  this  positive  wrong  that  the  flagran- 
cy,  what  she  would  have  been  ready  to 


JULIA         BRIDE 

call  the  very  vulgarity,  of  her  good  looks 
might  do  her  at  a  moment  when  it  was  vital 
she  should  hang  as  straight  as  a  picture  on 
the  wall.  Had  it  ever  yet  befallen  any  young 
woman  in  the  world  to  wish  with  secret  in 
tensity  that  she  might  have  been,  for  her 
convenience,  a  shade  less  inordinately  pretty  ? 
She  had  come  to  that,  to  this  view  of  the 
bane,  the  primal  curse,  of  their  lavish  phys 
ical  outfit,  which  had  included  everything 
and  as  to  which  she  lumped  herself  resent 
fully  with  her  mother.  The  only  thing  was 
that  her  mother  was,  thank  goodness,  still  so 
much  prettier,  still  so  assertively,  so  public 
ly,  so  trashily,  so  ruinously  pretty.  Won 
derful  the  small  grimness  with  which  Julia 
Bride  put  off  on  this  parent  the  middle-aged 
maximum  of  their  case  and  the  responsi 
bility  of  their  defect.  It  cost  her  so  little  to 
recognize  in  Mrs.  Connery  at  forty-seven, 
and  in  spite,  or  perhaps  indeed  just  by  rea 
son,  of  the  arranged  silver  tendrils  which 
were  so  like  some  rare  bird's-nest  in  a  morn 
ing  frost,  a  facile  supremacy  for  the  dazzling 


JULIA          BRIDE 

effect— it  cost  her  so  little  that  her  view  even 
rather  exaggerated  the  lustre  of  the  dif 
ferent  maternal  items.  She  would  have  put 
it  all  off  if  possible,  all  off  on  other  shoulders 
and  on  other  graces  and  other  morals  than 
her  own,  the  burden  of  physical  charm  that 
had  made  so  easy  a  ground,  such  a  native 
favoring  air,  for  the  aberrations  which,  ap 
parently  inevitable  and  without  far  con 
sequences  at  the  time,  had  yet  at  this  junc 
ture  so  much  better  not  have  been. 

She  could  have  worked  it  out  at  her  leisure, 
to  the  last  link  of  the  chain,  the  way  their 
prettiness  had  set  them  trap  after  trap,  all 
along— had  foredoomed  them  to  awful  in 
eptitude.  When  you  were  as  pretty  as  that 
you  could,  by  the  whole  idiotic  consensus, 
be  nothing  but  pretty;  and  when  you  were 
nothing  "but"  pretty  you  could  get  into 
nothing  but  tight  places,  out  of  which  you 
could  then  scramble  by  nothing  but  masses 
of  fibs.  And  there  was  no  one,  all  the  while, 
who  wasn't  eager  to  egg  you  on,  eager  to 
make  you  pay  to  the  last  cent  the  price  of 
[16] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

your  beauty.  What  creature  would  ever  for 
a  moment  help  you  to  behave  as  if  something 
that  dragged  in  its  wake  a  bit  less  of  a  lum 
bering  train  would,  on  the  whole,  have  been 
better  for  you?  The  consequences  of  being 
plain  were  only  negative — you  failed  of  this 
and  that;  but  the  consequences  of  being  as 
they  were,  what  were  these  but  endless? 
though  indeed,  as  far  as  failing  went,  your 
beauty  too  could  let  you  in  for  enough  of  it. 
Who,  at  all  events,  would  ever  for  a  moment 
credit  you,  in  the  luxuriance  of  that  beauty, 
with  the  study,  on  your  own  side,  of  such 
truths  as  these?  Julia  Bride  could,  at  the 
point  she  had  reached,  positively  ask  herself 
this  even  while  lucidly  conscious  of  the  in 
imitable,  the  triumphant  and  attested  pro 
jection,  all  round  her,  of  her  exquisite  image. 
It  was  only  Basil  French  who  had  at  last, 
in  his  doubtless  dry,  but  all  distinguished 
way — the  way  surely,  as  it  was  borne  in  upon 
her,  of  all  the  blood  of  all  the  Frenches- 
stepped  out  of  the  vulgar  rank.  It  was  only 
he  who,  by  the  trouble  she  discerned  in  him, 
[17] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

had  made  her  see  certain  things.  It  was  only 
for  him — and  not  a  bit  ridiculously,  but  just 
beautifully,  almost  sublimely — that  their  be 
ing  "nice,"  her  mother  and  she  between 
them,  had  not  seemed  to  profit  by  their  being 
so  furiously  handsome. 

This  had,  ever  so  grossly  and  ever  so 
tiresomely,  satisfied  every  one  else;  since 
every  one  had  thrust  upon  them,  had  im 
posed  upon  them,  as  by  a  great  cruel  con 
spiracy,  their  silliest  possibilities;  fencing 
them  in  to  these,  and  so  not  only  shutting 
them  out  from  others,  but  mounting  guard 
at  the  fence,  walking  round  and  round  out 
side  it,  to  see  they  didn't  escape,  and  ad 
miring  them,  talking  to  them,  through  the 
rails,  in  mere  terms  of  chaff,  terms  of  chucked 
cakes  and  apples — as  if  they  had  been  ante 
lopes  or  zebras,  or  even  some  superior  sort  of 
performing,  of  dancing,  bear.  It  had  been 
reserved  for  Basil  French  to  strike  her  as 
willing  to  let  go,  so  to  speak,  a  pound  or  two 
of  this  fatal  treasure  if  he  might  only  have 
got  in  exchange  for  it  an  ounce  or  so  more 
[18] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

of  their  so  much  less  obvious  and  less  pub 
lished  personal  history.  Yes,  it  described 
him  to  say  that,  in  addition  to  all  the  rest  of 
him,  and  of  his  personal  history,  and  of  his 
family,  and  of  theirs,  in  addition  to  their 
social  posture,  as  that  of  a  serried  phalanx, 
and  to  their  notoriously  enormous  wealth 
and  crushing  respectability,  she  might  have 
been  ever  so  much  less  lovely  for  him  if  she 
had  been  only — well,  a  little  prepared  to 
answer  questions.  And  it  wasn't  as  if  quiet, 
cultivated,  earnest,  public-spirited,  brought 
up  in  Germany,  infinitely  travelled,  awfully 
like  a  high-caste  Englishman,  and  all  the 
other  pleasant  things,  it  wasn't  as  if  he  didn't 
love  to  be  with  her,  to  look  at  her,  just  as 
she  was;  for  he  loved  it  exactly  as  much,  so 
far  as  that  footing  simply  went,  as  any  free 
and  foolish  youth  who  had  ever  made  the 
last  demonstration  of  it.  It  was  that  mar 
riage  was,  for  him — and  for  them  all,  the 
serried  Frenches — a  great  matter,  a  goal  to 
which  a  man  of  intelligence,  a  real  shy, 
beautiful  man  of  the  world,  didn't  hop  on 
[19] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

one  foot,  didn't  skip  and  jump,  as  if  he  were 
playing  an  urchins'  game,  but  toward  which 
he  proceeded  with  a  deep  and  anxious,  a 
noble  and  highly  just  deliberation. 

For  it  was  one  thing  to  stare  at  a  girl  till 
she  was  bored  with  it,  it  was  one  thing  to 
take  her  to  the  Horse  Show  and  the  Opera, 
and  to  send  her  flowers  by  the  stack,  and 
chocolates  by  the  ton,  and  "great"  novels, 
the  very  latest  and  greatest,  by  the  dozen; 
but  something  quite  other  to  hold  open  for 
her,  with  eyes  attached  to  eyes,  the  gate, 
moving  on  such  stiff  silver  hinges,  of  the 
grand  square  forecourt  of  the  palace  of  wed 
lock.  The  state  of  being  "  engaged "  rep 
resented  to  him  the  introduction  to  this 
precinct  of  some  young  woman  with  whom 
his  outside  parley  would  have  had  the  dura 
tion,  distinctly,  of  his  own  convenience. 
That  might  be  cold-blooded  if  one  chose  to 
think  so ;  but  nothing  of  another  sort  would 
equal  the  high  ceremony  and  dignity  and 
decency,  above  all  the  grand  gallantry  and 
finality,  of  their  then  passing  in.  Poor  Julia 
[20] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

could  have  blushed  red,  before  that  view, 
with  the  memory  of  the  way  the  forecourt, 
as  she  now  imagined  it,  had  been  dishonored 
by  her  younger  romps.  She  had  tumbled 
over  the  wall  with  this,  that,  and  the  other 
raw  playmate,  and  had  played  "tag"  and 
leap-frog,  as  she  might  say,  from  corner -to 
corner.  That  would  be  the  ''history"  with 
which,  in  case  of  definite  demand,  she  should 
be  able  to  supply  Mr.  French:  that  she  had 
already,  again  and  again,  any  occasion  of 
fering,  chattered  and  scuffled  over  ground 
provided,  according  to  his  idea,  for  walking 
the  gravest  of  minuets.  If  that  then  had 
been  all  their  kind  of  history,  hers  and  her 
mother's,  at  least  there  was  plenty  of  it:  it 
was  the  superstructure  raised  on  the  other 
group  of  facts,  those  of  the  order  of  their  hav 
ing  been  always  so  perfectly  pink  and  white, 
so  perfectly  possessed  of  clothes,  so  perfectly 
splendid,  so  perfectly  idiotic.  These  things 
had  been  the  "  points  "  of  antelope  and  zebra; 
putting  Mrs.  Connery  for  the  zebra,  as  the 
more  remarkably  striped  or  spotted.  Such 
[21] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

were  the  data  Basil  French's  inquiry  would 
elicit:  her  own  six  engagements  and  her 
mother's  three  nullified  marriages — nine  nice 
distinct  little  horrors  in  all.  What  on  earth 
was  to  be  done  about  them  ? 

It  was  notable,  she  was  afterward  to 
recognize,  that  there  had  been  nothing  of 
the  famous  business  slackness  in  the  positive 
pounce  with  which  Mr.  Pitman  put  it  to  her 
that,  as  soon  as  he  had  made  her  out  "for 
sure,"  identified  her  there  as  old  Julia  grown 
up  and  gallivanting  with  a  new  admirer,  a 
smarter  young  fellow  than  ever  yet,  he  had 
had  the  inspiration  of  her  being  exactly  the 
good  girl  to  help  him.  She  certainly  found 
him  strike  the  hour  again,  with  these  vulgari 
ties  of  tone  —  forms  of  speech  that  her 
mother  had  anciently  described  as  by  them 
selves,  once  he  had  opened  the  whole  battery, 
sufficient  ground  for  putting  him  away.  Full, 
however,  of  the  use  she  should  have  for  him, 
she  wasn't  going  to  mind  trifles.  What  she 
really  gasped  at  was  that,  so  oddly,  he  was 

[22] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

ahead  of  her  at  the  start.  ;'  Yes,  I  want 
something  of  you,  Julia,  and  I  want  it  right 
now:  you  can  do  me  a  turn,  and  I'm  blest 
if  my  luck — which  has  once  or  twice  been 
pretty  good,  you  know — hasn't  sent  you  to 
me."  She  knew  the  luck  he  meant — that 
of  her  mother's  having  so  enabled  him  to  get 
rid  of  her;  but  it  was  the  nearest  allusion  of 
the  merely  invidious  kind  that  he  would 
make.  It  had  thus  come  to  our  young  wom 
an  on  the  spot  and  by  divination :  the  service 
he  desired  of  her  matched  with  remarkable 
closeness  what  she  had  so  promptly  taken 
into  her  head  to  name  to  himself — to  name 
in  her  own  interest,  though  deterred  as  yet 
from  having  brought  it  right  out.  She  had 
been  prevented  by  his  speaking,  the  first 
thing,  in  that  way,  as  if  he  had  known  Mr. 
French — which  surprised  her  till  he  ex 
plained  that  every  one  in  New  York  knew  by 
appearance  a  young  man  of  his  so  -  quoted 
wealth  ("What  did  she  take  them  all  in 
New  York  then  for?")  and  of  whose  marked 
attention  to  her  he  had  moreover,  for  him- 
[23] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

self,  round  at  clubs  and  places,  lately  heard. 
This  had  accompanied  the  inevitable  free 
question  "  Was  she  engaged  to  him  now?"- 
which  she  had  in  fact  almost  welcomed  as 
holding  out  to  her  the  perch  of  opportunity. 
She  was  waiting  to  deal  with  it  properly, but 
meanwhile  he  had  gone  on,  and  to  such  effect 
that  it  took  them  but  three  minutes  to  turn 
out,  on  either  side,  like  a  pair  of  pickpockets 
comparing,  under  shelter,  their  day's  booty, 
the  treasures  of  design  concealed  about  their 
persons. 

"  I  want  you  to  tell  the  truth  for  me — as 
you  only  can.  I  want  you  to  say  that  I  was 
really  all  right — as  right  as  you  know;  and 
that  I  simply  acted  like  an  angel  in  a  story 
book,  gave  myself  away  to  have  it  over." 

"Why,  my  dear  man,"  Julia  cried,  "you 
take  the  wind  straight  out  of  my  sails! 
What  I'm  here  to  ask  of  you  is  that  you'll 
confess  to  having  been  even  a  worse  fiend 
than  you  were  shown  up  for;  to  having  made 
it  impossible  mother  should  not  take  pro 
ceedings."  There! — she  had  brought  it  out, 
[24] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

and  with  the  sense  of  their  situation  turning 
to  high  excitement  for  her  in  the  teeth  of  his 
droll  stare,  his  strange  grin,  his  characteristic 
"  Lordy,  lordy!  What  good  will  that  do 
you?"  She  was  prepared  with  her  clear 
statement  of  reasons  for  her  appeal,  and 
feared  so  he  might  have  better  ones  for  his 
own  that  all  her  story  came  in  a  flash. 
"  Well,  Mr.  Pitman,  I  want  to  get  married 
this  time,  by  way  of  a  change;  but  you  see 
we've  been  such  fools  that,  when  something 
really  good  at  last  comes  up,  it's  too  dread 
fully  awkward.  The  fools  we  were  capable 
of  being — well,  you  know  better  than  any 
one :  unless  perhaps  not  quite  so  well  as  Mr. 
Connery.  It  has  got  to  be  denied,"  said 
Julia  ardently— "  it  has  got  to  be  denied  flat. 
But  I  can't  get  hold  of  Mr.  Connery — Mr. 
Connery  has  gone  to  China.  Besides,  if  he 
were  here,"  she  had  ruefully  to  confess,  "  he'd 
be  no  good— on  the  contrary.  He  wouldn't 
deny  anything — he'd  only  tell  more.  So 
thank  heaven  he's  away  -  -  there's  that 
amount  of  good!  I'm  not  engaged  yet," 
[  25  ] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

she  went  on — but  he  had  already  taken  her 
up. 

"  You're  not  engaged  to  Mr.  French  ?"  It 
was  all,  clearly,  a  wondrous  show  for  him, 
but  his  immediate  surprise,  oddly,  might 
have  been  greatest  for  that. 

"  No,  not  to  any  one — for  the  seventh 
time!"  She  spoke  as  with  her  head  held  well 
up  both  over  the  shame  and  the  pride.  "  Yes, 
the  next  time  I'm  engaged  I  want  something 
to  happen.  But  he's  afraid;  he's  afraid  of 
what  may  be  told  him.  He's  dying  to  find 
out,  and  yet  he'd  die  if  he  did!  He  wants  to 
be  talked  to,  but  he  has  got  to  be  talked  to 
right.  You  could  talk  to  him  right,  Mr. 
Pitman — if  you  only  would!  He  can't  get 
over  mother — that  I  feel:  he  loathes  and 
scorns  divorces,  and  we've  had  first  and  last 
too  many.  So  if  he  could  hear  from  you 
that  you  just  made  her  life  a  hell — why," 
Julia  concluded,  "  it  would  be  too  lovely.  If 
she  had  to  go  in  for  another — after  having 
already,  when  I  was  little,  divorced  father- 
it  would  '  sort  of '  make,  don't  you  see  ?  one 

[26] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

less.  You'd  do  the  high-toned  thing  by  her: 
you'd  say  what  a  wretch  you  then  were,  and 
that  she  had  had  to  save  her  life.  In  that 
way  he  mayn't  mind  it.  Don't  you  see,  you 
sweet  man?"  poor  Julia  pleaded.  "Oh," 
she  wound  up  as  if  his  fancy  lagged  or  his 
scruple  looked  out,  "  of  course  I  want  you  to 
lie  for  me!" 

It  did  indeed  sufficiently  stagger  him.  "  It's 
a  lovely  idea  for  the  moment  when  I  was 
just  saying  to  myself — as  soon  as  I  saw  you 
—that  you'd  speak  the  truth  for  me!" 

"Ah,  what's  the  matter  with  'you'?" 
Julia  sighed  with  an  impatience  not  sensibly 
less  sharp  for  her  having  so  quickly  scented 
some  lion  in  her  path. 

"  Why,  do  you  think  there's  no  one  in  the 
world  but  you  who  has  seen  the  cup  of 
promised  affection,  of  something  really  to  be 
depended  on,  only,  at  the  last  moment,  by 
the  horrid  jostle  of  your  elbow,  spilled  all 
over  you  ?  I  want  to  provide  for  my  future 
too  as  it  happens;  and  my  good  friend  who's 
to  help  me  to  that— the  most  charming  of 
[27] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

women  this  time — disapproves  of  divorce 
quite  as  much  as  Mr.  French.  Don't  you 
see,"  Mr.  Pitman  candidly  asked,  "  what  that 
by  itself  must  have  done  toward  attaching 
me  to  her?  She  has  got  to  be  talked  to— 
to  be  told  how  little  I  could  help  it." 

"Oh,  lordy,  lordy!"  the  girl  emulously 
groaned.  It  was  such  a  relieving  cry.  "  Well, 
/  won't  talk  to  her!"  she  declared. 

"You  won't,  Julia?"  he  pitifully  echoed. 
"And  yet  you  ask  of  me — /" 

His  pang,  she  felt,  was  sincere;  and  even 
more  than  she  had  guessed,  for  the  previous 
quarter  of  an  hour  he  had  been  building  up 
his  hope,  building  it  with  her  aid  for  a  foun 
dation.  Yet  was  he  going  to  see  how  their 
testimony,  on  each  side,  would,  if  offered, 
have  to  conflict  ?  If  he  was  to  prove  himself 
for  her  sake — or,  more  queerly  still,  for  that 
of  Basil  French's  high  conservatism— a  per 
son  whom  there  had  been  no  other  way  of 
dealing  with,  how  could  she  prove  him,  in 
this  other  and  so  different  interest,  a  mere 
gentle  sacrifice  to  his  wife's  perversity  ?  She 
[28] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

had,  before  him  there,  on  the  instant,  all 
acutely,  a  sense  of  rising  sickness — a  wan 
glimmer  of  foresight  as  to  the  end  of  the 
fond  dream.  Everything  else  was  against 
her,  everything  in  her  dreadful  past — just 
as  if  she  had  been  a  person  represented  by 
some  "emotional  actress,"  some  desperate 
erring  lady  " hunted  down"  in  a  play;  but 
was  that  going  to  be  the  case  too  with  her 
own  very  decency,  the  fierce  little  residuum 
deep  within  her,  for  which  she  was  counting, 
when  she  came  to  think,  on  so  little  glory  or 
even  credit  ?  Was  this  also  going  to  turn 
against  her  and  trip  her  up — just  to  show 
she  was  really,  under  the  touch  and  the  test, 
as  decent  as  any  one;  and  with  no  one  but 
herself  the  wiser  for  it  meanwhile,  and  no 
proof  to  show  but  that,  as  a  consequence,  she 
should  be  unmarried  to  the  end?  She  put 
it  to  Mr.  Pitman  quite  with  resentment: 
"  Do  you  mean  to  say  you're  going  to  be 
married — ?" 

"Oh,   my  dear,   I  too  must  get  engaged 
first!"-— he  spoke  with  his  inimitable  grin. 
[29] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

"But  that,  you  see,  is  where  you  come  in. 
I've  told  her  about  you.  She  wants  awfully 
to  meet  you.  The  way  it  happens  is  too 
lovely — that  I  find  you  just  in  this  place. 
She's  coming,"  said  Mr.  Pitman — and  as  in 
all  the  good  faith  of  his  eagerness  now;  "  she's 
coming  in  about  three  minutes." 

"Coming  here?" 

"Yes,  Julia — right  here.  It's  where  we 
usually  meet  ";  and  he  was  wreathed  again, 
this  time  as  if  for  life,  in  his  large  slow  smile. 
"  She  loves  this  place — she's  awfully  keen  on 
art.  Like  you,  Julia,  if  you  haven't  changed 
—I  remember  how  you  did  love  art."  He 
looked  at  her  quite  tenderly,  as  to  keep  her 
up  to  it.  "  You  must  still  of  course — from 
the  way  you're  here.  Just  let  her  feel  that," 
the  poor  man  fantastically  urged.  And 
then  with  his  kind  eyes  on  her  and  his 
good  ugly  mouth  stretched  as  for  delicate 
emphasis  from  ear  to  ear:  "Every  little 
helps!" 

He  made  her  wonder  for  him,  ask  herself, 
and  with  a  certain  intensity,  questions  she 

[30] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

yet  hated  the  trouble  of;  as  whether  he  were 
still  as  moneyless  as  in  the  other  time — which 
was  certain  indeed,  for  any  fortune  he  ever 
would  have  made.  His  slackness,  on  that 
ground,  stuck  out  of  him  almost  as  much  as 
if  he  had  been  of  rusty  or  "  seedy  "  aspect— 
which,  luckily  for  him,  he  wasn't  at  all:  he 
looked,  in  his  way,  like  some  pleasant  eccen 
tric,  ridiculous,  but  real  gentleman,  wrhose 
taste  might  be  of  the  queerest,  but  his  credit 
with  his  tailor  none  the  less  of  the  best.  She 
wouldn't  have  been  the  least  ashamed.,  had 
their  connection  lasted,  of  going  about  with 
him:  so  that  what  a  fool,  again,  her  mother 
had  been — since  Mr.  Connery,  sorry  as  one 
might  be  for  him,  was  irrepressibly  vulgar. 
Julia's  quickness  was,  for  the  minute,  charged 
with  all  this;  but  she  had  none  the  less  her 
feeling  of  the  right  thing  to  say  and  the  right 
way  to  say  it.  If  he  was  after  a  future  finan 
cially  assured,  even  as  she  herself  so  fran 
tically  was,  she  wouldn't  cast  the  stone. 
But  if  he  had  talked  about  her  to  strange 
women  she  couldn't  be  less  than  a  little 


JULIA         BRIDE 

majestic.  "Who  then  is  the  person  in  ques 
tion  for  you — ?" 

"Why,  such  a  dear  thing,  Julia — Mrs. 
David  E.  Brack.  Have  you  heard  of  her?" 
he  almost  fluted. 

New  York  was  vast,  and  she  had  not  had 
that  advantage.  "She's  a  widow — ?" 

"Oh  yes:  she's  not — !"  He  caught  him 
self  up  in  time.  "  She's  a  real  one."  It  was 
as  near  as  he  came.  But  it  was  as  if  he  had 
been  looking  at  her  now  so  pathetically  hard. 
"Julia,  she  has  millions." 

Hard,  at  any  rate — whether  pathetic  or 
not  —  was  the  look  she  gave  him  back. 
"  Well,  so  has — or  so  will  have — Basil  French. 
And  more  of  them  than  Mrs.  Brack,  I  guess," 
Julia  quavered. 

"  Oh,  I  know  what  they've  got!"  He  took 
it  from  her — with  the  effect  of  a  vague  stir, 
in  his  long  person,  of  unwelcome  embarrass 
ment.  But  was  she  going  to  give  up  be 
cause  he  was  embarrassed  ?  He  should  know 
at  least  what  he  was  costing  her.  It  came 
home  to  her  own  spirit  more  than  ever;  but 
[32] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

meanwhile  he  had  found  his  footing.  "I 
don't  see  how  your  mother  matters.  It 
isn't  a  question  of  his  marrying  her." 

"No;  but,  constantly  together  as  we've 
always  been,  it's  a  question  of  there  being  so 
disgustingly  much  to  get  over.  If  we  had, 
for  people  like  them,  but  the  one  ugly  spot 
and  the  one  weak  side;  if  we  had  made, 
between  us,  but  the  one  vulgar  kind  of  mis 
take:  well,  I  don't  say!"  She  reflected  with  a 
wistfulness  of  note  that  was  in  itself  a  touch 
ing  eloquence.  "  To  have  our  reward  in  this 
world  we've  had  too  sweet  a  time.  We've 
had  it  all  right  down  here!"  said  Julia  Bride. 
"  I  should  have  taken  the  precaution  to  have 
about  a  dozen  fewrer  lovers." 

"Ah,  my  dear,  'lovers' — !"  He  ever  so 
comically  attenuated. 

"Well  they  were!"  She  quite  flared  up. 
"  When  you've  had  a  ring  from  each  (three 
diamonds,  two  pearls,  and  a  rather  bad 
sapphire:  I've  kept  them  all,  and  they  tell 
my  story!)  what  are  you  to  call  them?" 

"Oh,  rings—!"  Mr.  Pitman  didn't  call 
[  33  1 


JULIA         BRIDE 

rings  anything.  "  I've  given  Mrs.  Drack 
a  ring." 

Julia  stared.  "Then  aren't  you  her 
lover?" 

"  That,  dear  child,"  he  humorously  wailed, 
"is  what  I  want  you  to  find  out!  But  I'll 
handle  your  rings  all  right,"  he  more  lucidly 
added. 

"You'll  'handle'  them?" 

"I'll  fix  your  lovers.  I'll  lie  about  them, 
if  that's  all  you  want." 

"  Oh,  about '  them ' — !"  She  turned  away 
with  a  sombre  drop,  seeing  so  little  in  it. 
'That  wouldn't  count  —  from  you!"  She 
saw  the  great  shining  room,  with  its  mockery 
of  art  and  "  style  "  and  security,  all  the  things 
she  was  vainly  after,  and  its  few  scattered 
visitors  who  had  left  them,  Mr.  Pitman  and 
herself,  in  their  ample  corner,  so  conven 
iently  at  ease.  There  was  only  a  lady 
in  one  of  the  far  doorways,  of  whom  she 
took  vague  note  and  who  seemed  to  be 
looking  at  them.  "They'd  have  to  lie  for 
themselves!" 

[34] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

"  Do  you  mean  he's  capable  of  putting  it 
to  them?" 

Mr.  Pitman's  tone  threw  discredit  on  that 
possibility,  but  she  knew  perfectly  well  what 
she  meant.  "  Not  of  getting  at  them  direct 
ly,  not,  as  mother  says,  of  nosing  round  him 
self;  but  of  listening — and  small  blame  to 
him! — to  the  horrible  things  other  people 
say  of  me." 

"But  what  other  people?" 

"Why,  Mrs.  George  Maule,  to  begin  with 
—who  intensely  loathes  us,  and  who  talks 
to  his  sisters,  so  that  they  may  talk  to  him: 
which  they  do,  all  the  while,  I'm  morally 
sure  (hating  me  as  they  also  must).  But 
it's  she  who's  the  real  reason — I  mean  of  his 
holding  off.  She  poisons  the  air  he  breathes." 

"Oh  well,"  said  Mr.  Pitman  with  easy 
optimism,  "if  Mrs.  George  Maule's  a  cat — !" 

"  If  she's  a  cat  she  has  kittens — four  little 

spotlessly  white  ones,   among  whom  she'd 

give  her  head  that  Mr.  French  should  make 

his  pick.     He  could  do  it  with  his  eyes  shut 

—you  can't  tell  them  apart.     But  she  has 

[35] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

every  name,  every  date,  as  you  may  say, 
for  my  dark  '  record ' — as  of  course  they  all 
call  it :  she'll  be  able  to  give  him,  if  he  brings 
himself  to  ask  her,  every  fact  in  its  order. 
And  all  the  while,  don't  you  see?  there's  no 
one  to  speak  for  me." 

It  would  have  touched  a  harder  heart  than 
her  loose  friend's  to  note  the  final  flush  of 
clairvoyance  witnessing  this  assertion  and 
under  which  her  eyes  shone  as  with  the  rush 
of  quick  tears.  He  stared  at  her,  and  at 
what  this  did  for  the  deep  charm  of  her 
prettiness,  as  in  almost  witless  admiration. 
"  But  can't  you— lovely  as  you  are,  you 
beautiful  thing! — speak  for  yourself?" 

"  Do  you  mean  can't  I  tell  the  lies?  No, 
then,  I  can't — and  I  wouldn't  if  I  could. 
I  don't  lie  myself,  you  know — as  it  happens; 
and  it  could  represent  to  him  then  about  the 
only  thing,  the  only  bad  one,  I  don't  do. 
I  did — 'lovely  as  I  am'! — have  my  regular 
time;  I  wasn't  so  hideous  that  I  couldn't! 
Besides,  do  you  imagine  he'd  come  and  ask 
me?" 

[36] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

"Gad,  I  wish  he  would,  Julia!"  said  Mr. 
Pitman  with  his  kind  eyes  on  her. 

"Well  then,  I'd  tell  him!"  And  she  held 
her  head  again  high.  "  But  he  won't." 

It  fairly  distressed  her  companion.  "  Does 
n't  he  want  then  to  know — ?" 

"  He  wants  not  to  know.  He  wants  to  be 
told  without  asking — told,  I  mean,  that  each 
of  the  stories,  those  that  have  come  to  him, 
is  a  fraud  and  a  libel.  Qui  s 'excuse  s' accuse, 
don't  they  say? — so  that  do  you  see  me 
breaking  out  to  him,  unprovoked,  with  four 
or  five  what-do-you-call-'ems,  the  things 
mother  used  to  have  to  prove  in  court,  a  set 
of  neat  little  '  alibis  '  in  a  row  ?  How  can  I 
get  hold  of  so  many  precious  gentlemen,  to 
turn  them  on  ?  How  can  they  want  every 
thing  fished  up?" 

She  had  paused  for  her  climax,  in  the  in 
tensity  of  these  considerations;  which  gave 
Mr.  Pitman  a  chance  to  express  his  honest 
faith.  "Why,  my  sweet  child,  they'd  be 
just  glad—!" 

It  determined  in  her  loveliness  almost  a 

[37] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

sudden  glare.  "  Glad  to  swear  they  never 
had  anything  to  do  with  such  a  creature? 
Then  Td  be  glad  to  swear  they  had  lots!" 

His  persuasive  smile,  though  confessing 
to  bewilderment,  insisted.  "  Why,  my  love, 
they've  got  to  swear  either  one  thing  or  the 
other." 

"They've  got  to  keep  out  of  the  way— 
that's  their  view  of  it,  I  guess,"  said  Julia. 
"Where  are  they,  please — now  that  they 
may  be  wanted  ?  If  you'd  like  to  hunt  them 
up  for  me  you're  very  welcome."  With 
which,  for  the  moment,  over  the  difficult 
case,  they  faced  each  other  helplessly  enough. 
And  she  added  to  it  now  the  sharpest  ache 
of  her  despair.  "  He  knows  about  Murray 
Brush.  The  others  "•  —and  her  pretty  white- 
gloved  hands  and  charming  pink  shoulders 
gave  them  up—  •" may  go  hang!" 

"Murray  Brush — ?"  It  had  opened  Mr. 
Pitman's  eyes. 

"Yes — yes;  I  do  mind  him." 

"  Then  what's  the  matter  with  his  at  least 
rallying — ?" 

[38] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

"The  matter  is  that,  being  ashamed  of 
himself,  as  he  well  might,  he  left  the  country 
as  soon  as  he  could  and  has  stayed  away. 
The  matter  is  that  he's  in  Paris  or  somewhere, 
and  that  if  you  expect  him  to  come  home 
for  me — !"  She  had  already  dropped,  how 
ever,  as  at  Mr.  Pitman's  look. 

"Why,  you  foolish  thing,  Murray  Brush 
is  in  New  York!"  It  had  quite  brightened 
him  up. 

"He  has  come  back — ?" 

''Why,  sure!  I  saw  him — when  was  it? 
Tuesday! — on  the  Jersey  boat."  Mr.  Pit 
man  rejoiced  in  his  news.  "  He's  your  man!" 

Julia  too  had  been  affected  by  it;  it  had 
brought,  in  a  rich  wave,  her  hot  color  back. 
But  she  gave  the  strangest  dim  smile.  "  He 
was!" 

"Then  get  hold  of  him,  and — if  he's  a 
gentleman — he'll  prove  for  you,  to  the  hilt, 
that  he  wasn't." 

It  lighted  in  her  face,  the  kindled  train 
of  this  particular  sudden  suggestion,  a  glow, 
a  sharpness  of  interest,  that  had  deepened 
[39] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

the  next  moment,  while  she  gave  a  slow  and 
sad  head-shake,  to  a  greater  strangeness  yet. 
"He  isn't  a  gentleman." 

"Ah,  lordy,  lordy!"  Mr.  Pitman  again 
sighed.  He  struggled  out  of  it  but  only  into 
the  vague.  "  Oh  then,  if  he's  a  pig — !" 

"You  see  there  are  only  a  few  gentlemen 
— not  enough  to  go  round — and  that  makes 
them  count  so!"  It  had  thrust  the  girl  her 
self,  for  that  matter,  into  depths ;  but  whether 
most  of  memory  or  of  roused  purpose  he  had 
no  time  to  judge — aware  as  he  suddenly  was 
of  a  shadow  (since  he  mightn't  perhaps  too 
quickly  call  it  a  light)  across  the  heaving 
surface  of  their  question.  It  fell  upon  Julia's 
face,  fell  with  the  sound  of  the  voice  he  so 
well  knew,  but  which  could  only  be  odd  to 
her  for  all  it  immediately  assumed. 

"  There  are  indeed  very  few — and  one 
mustn't  try  them  too  much!"  Mrs.  Brack, 
who  had  supervened  while  they  talked,  stood, 
in  monstrous  magnitude — at  least  to  Julia's 
reimpressed  eyes — between  them:  she  was 
the  lady  our  young  woman  had  descried 
[40] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

across  the  room,  and  she  had  drawn  near 
while  the  interest  of  their  issue  so  held  them. 
We  have  seen  the  act  of  observation  and 
that  of  reflection  alike  swift  in  Julia — once 
her  subject  was  within  range — and  she  had 
now,  with  all  her  perceptions  at  the  acutest, 
taken  in,  by  a  single  stare,  the  strange 
presence  to  a  happy  connection  with  which 
Mr.  Pitman  aspired  and  which  had  thus  sail 
ed,  with  placid  majesty,  into  their  troubled 
waters.  She  was  clearly  not  shy,  Mrs. 
David  E.  Brack,  yet  neither  was  she  omi 
nously  bold ;  she  was  bland  and  "  good, ' '  Julia 
made  sure  at  a  glance,  and  of  a  large  com 
placency,  as  the  good  and  the  bland  are  apt 
to  be — a  large  complacency,  a  large  sen 
timentality,  a  large  innocent,  elephantine 
archness:  she  fairly  rioted  in  that  dimension 
of  size.  Habited  in  an  extraordinary  quan 
tity  of  stiff  and  lustrous  black  brocade,  with 
enhancements,  of  every  description,  that 
twinkled  and  tinkled,  that  rustled  and  rum 
bled  with  her  least  movement,  she  presented 
a  huge,  hideous,  pleasant  face,  a  featureless 
[41] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

desert  in  a  remote  quarter  of  which  the 
disproportionately  small  eyes  might  have 
figured  a  pair  of  rash  adventurers  all  but 
buried  in  the  sand.  They  reduced  them 
selves  when  she  smiled  to  barely  discernible 
points — a  couple  of  mere  tiny  emergent  heads 
— though  the  foreground  of  the  scene,  as  if 
to  make  up  for  it,  gaped  with  a  vast  benev 
olence.  In  a  word  Julia  saw  —  and  as  if 
she  had  needed  nothing  more;  saw  Mr.  Pit 
man's  opportunity,  saw  her  own,  saw  the 
exact  nature  both  of  Mrs.  Brack's  circum 
spection  and  of  Mrs.  Brack's  sensibility,  saw 
even,  glittering  there  in  letters  of  gold  and 
as  a  part  of  the  whole  metallic  coruscation, 
the  large  figure  of  her  income,  largest  of  all 
her  attributes,  and  (though  perhaps  a  little 
more  as  a  luminous  blur  beside  all  this)  the 
mingled  ecstasy  and  agony  of  Mr.  Pitman's 
hope  and  Mr.  Pitman's  fear. 

He  was  introducing  them,  with  his  pathet 
ic  belief  in  the  virtue  for  every  occasion,  in 
the  solvent  for  every  trouble,  of  an  extrava 
gant,  genial,  professional  humor;  he  was 

[42] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

naming  her  to  Mrs.  Brack  as  the  charming 
young  friend  he  had  told  her  so  much  about 
and  who  had  been  as  an  angel  to  him  in  a 
weary  time ;  he  was  saying  that  the  loveliest 
chance  in  the  world,  this  accident  of  a  meet 
ing  in  those  promiscuous  halls,  had  placed 
within  his  reach  the  pleasure  of  bringing 
them  together.  It  didn't  indeed  matter, 
Julia  felt,  what  he  was  saying:  he  conveyed 
everything,  as  far  as  she  was  concerned,  by 
a  moral  pressure  as  unmistakable  as  if,  for 
a  symbol  of  it,  he  had  thrown  himself  on  her 
neck.  Above  all,  meanwhile,  this  high  con 
sciousness  prevailed — that  the  good  lady 
herself,  however  huge  she  loomed,  had  en 
tered,  by  the  end  of  a  minute,  into  a  condi 
tion  as  of  suspended  weight  and  arrested 
mass,  stilled  to  artless  awe  by  the  fact  of  her 
vision.  Julia  had  practised  almost  to  lassi 
tude  the  art  of  tracing  in  the -people  who 
looked  at  her  the  impression  promptly  se 
quent;  but  it  was  a  striking  point  that  if,  in 
irritation,  in  depression,  she  felt  that  the 
lighted  eyes  of  men,  stupid  at  their  clearest, 
[43] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

had  given  her  pretty  well  all  she  should  ever 
care  for,  she  could  still  gather  a  freshness 
from  the  tribute  of  her  own  sex,  still  care  to 
see  her  reflection  in  the  faces  of  women. 
Never,  probably,  never  would  that  sweet  be 
tasteless — with  such  a  straight  grim  spoon 
was  it  mostly  administered,  and  so  flavored 
and  strengthened  by  the  competence  of  their 
eyes.  Women  knew  so  much  best  how  a 
woman  surpassed — how  and  where  and  why, 
with  no  touch  or  torment  of  it  lost  on  them ; 
so  that  as  it  produced  mainly  and  primarily 
the  instinct  of  aversion,  the  sense  of  extract 
ing  the  recognition,  of  gouging  out  the  hom 
age,  was  on  the  whole  the  highest  crown  one's 
felicity  could  wear.  Once  in  a  way,  how 
ever,  the  grimness  beautifully  dropped,  the 
jealousy  failed:  the  admiration  was  all  there 
and  the  poor  plain  sister  handsomely  paid  it. 
It  had  never  been  so  paid,  she  was  presently 
certain,  as  by  this  great  generous  object  of 
Mr.  Pitman's  flame,  who  without  optical  aid, 
it  well  might  have  seemed,  nevertheless  en 
tirely  grasped  her — might  in  fact,  all  benev- 
[44] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

olently,  have  been  groping  her  over  as  by 
some  huge  mild  proboscis.  She  gave  Mrs. 
Brack  pleasure  in  short;  and  who  could  say 
of  what  other  pleasures  the  poor  lady  hadn't 
been  cheated? 

It  was  somehow  a  muddled  world  in  which 
one  of  her  conceivable  joys,  at  this  time  of 
day,  would  be  to  marry  Mr.  Pitman — to  say 
nothing  of  a  state  of  things  in  which  this 
gentleman's  own  fancy  could  invest  such  a 
union  with  rapture.  That,  however,  was 
their  own  mystery,  and  Julia,  with  each  in 
stant,  was  more  and  more  clear  about  hers: 
so  remarkably  primed  in  fact,  at  the  end  of 
three  minutes,  that  though  her  friend,  and 
though  his  friend,  were  both  saying  things, 
many  things  and  perhaps  quite  wonderful 
things,  she  had  no  free  attention  for  them 
and  was  only  rising  and  soaring.  She  was 
rising  to  her  value,  she  was  soaring  with  it 
— the  value  Mr.  Pitman  almost  convulsively 
imputed  to  her,  the  value  that  consisted  for 
her  of  being  so  unmistakably  the  most  daz 
zling  image  Mrs.  Drack  had  ever  beheld. 
[45] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

These  were  the  uses,  for  Julia,  in  fine,  of 
adversity;  the  range  of  Mrs.  Brack's  ex 
perience  might  have  been  as  small  as  the 
measure  of  her  presence  was  large :  Julia  was 
at  any  rate  herself  in  face  of  the  occasion  of 
her  life,  and,  after  all  her  late  repudiations 
and  reactions,  had  perhaps  never  yet  known 
the  quality  of  this  moment's  success.  She 
hadn't  an  idea  of  what,  on  either  side,  had 
been  uttered — beyond  Mr.  Pitman's  allusion 
to  her  having  befriended  him  of  old :  she  sim 
ply  held  his  companion  with  her  radiance 
and  knew  she  might  be,  for  her  effect,  as 
irrelevant  as  she  chose.  It  was  relevant  to 
do  what  he  wanted — it  was  relevant  to  dish 
herself.  She  did  it  now  with  a  kind  of  pas 
sion,  to  say  nothing  of  her  knowing,  with  it, 
that  every  word  of  it  added  to  her  beauty. 
She  gave  him  away  in  short,  up  to  the  hilt,  for 
any  use  of  her  own,  and  should  have  noth 
ing  to  clutch  at  now  but  the  possibility  of 
Murray  Brush. 

"  He  says  I  was  good  to  him,  Mrs.  Brack ; 
and  I'm  sure  I  hope  I  was,  since  I  should  be 

[46] 


HE     SAYS      1      WAS     GOOD     TO      HIM,      MRS.      DRACK 


JULIA         BRIDE 

ashamed  to  be  anything  else.  If  I  could  be 
good  to  him  now  I  should  be  glad — that's 
just  what,  a  while  ago,  I  rushed  up  to  him 
here,  after  so  long,  to  give  myself  the  pleasure 
of  saying.  I  saw  him  years  ago  very  par 
ticularly,  very  miserably  tried — and  I  saw 
the  way  he  took  it.  I  did  see  it,  you  dear 
man,"  she  sublimely  went  on—  "  I  saw  it  for 
all  you  may  protest,  for  all  you  may  hate  me 
to  talk  about  you!  I  saw  you  behave  like  a 
gentleman — since  Mrs.  Brack  agrees  with  me, 
so  charmingly,  that  there  are  not  many  to 
be  met.  I  don't  know  whether  you  care, 
Mrs.  Brack"— she  abounded,  she  revelled 
in  the  name — "  but  I've  always  remembered 
it  of  him :  that  under  the  most  extraordinary 
provocation  he  was  decent  and  patient  and 
brave.  No  appearance  of  anything  different 
matters,  for  I  speak  of  what  I  know.  Of 
course  I'm  nothing  and  nobody;  I'm  only  a 
poor  frivolous  girl,  but  I  was  very  close  to 
him  at  the  time.  That's  all  my  little  story 
—if  it  should  interest  you  at  all."  She 
measured  every  beat  of  her  wing,  she  knew 
[47] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

how  high  she  was  going  and  paused  only 
when  it  was  quite  vertiginous.  Here  she 
hung  a  moment  as  in  the  glare  of  the  upper 
blue;  which  was  but  the  glare — what  else 
could  it  be? — of  the  vast  and  magnificent 
attention  of  both  her  auditors,  hushed,  on 
their  side,  in  the  splendor  she  emitted.  She 
had  at  last  to  steady  herself  and  she  scarce 
knew  afterwards  at  what  rate  or  in  what  way 
she  had  still  inimitably  come  down — -her 
own  eyes  fixed  all  the  while  on  the  very 
figure  of  her  achievement.  She  had  sacri 
ficed  her  mother  on  the  altar — proclaimed 
her  as  false  and  cruel;  and  if  that  didn't 
"fix"  Mr.  Pitman,  as  he  would  have  said 
— well,  it  was  all  she  could  do.  But  the 
cost  of  her  action  already  somehow  came 
back  to  her  with  increase;  the  dear  gaunt 
man  fairly  wavered,  to  her  sight,  in  the  glory 
of  it,  as  if  signalling  at  her,  with  wild  glee 
ful  arms,  from  some  mount  of  safety,  while 
the  massive  lady  just  spread  and  spread  like 
a  rich  fluid  a  bit  helplessly  spilt.  It  was 
really  the  outflow  of  the  poor  woman's 

[48] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

honest  response,  into  which  she  seemed  to 
melt,  and  Julia  scarce  distinguished  the  two 
apart  even  for  her  taking  gracious  leave  of 
each.  "  Good-bye,  Mrs.  Brack;  I'm  awfully 
happy  to  have  met  you  "  —like  as  not  it  was 
for  this  she  had  grasped  Mr.  Pitman's  hand. 
And  then  to  him  or  to  her,  it  didn't  matter 
which,  "  Good-bye,  dear  good  Mr.  Pitman— 
hasn't  it  been  nice  after  so  long?" 


II 


ULIA  floated  even  to  her  own 
sense  swanlike  away — she  left  in 
her  wake  their  fairly  stupefied 
submission:  it  was  as  if  she  had, 
by  an  exquisite  authority,  now 
placed  them,  each  for  each,  and  they  would 
have  nothing  to  do  but  be  happy  together. 
Never  had  she  so  exulted  as  on  this  ridicu 
lous  occasion  in  the  noted  items  of  her 
beauty.  Le  compte  y  etait,  as  they  used  to 
say  in  Paris — every  one  of  them,  for  her 
immediate  employment,  was  there;  and 
there  was  something  in  it  after  all.  It 
didn't  necessarily,  this  sum  of  thumping 
little  figures,  imply  charm — especially  for 
"refined"  people:  nobody  knew  better  than 
Julia  that  inexpressible  charm  and  quotable 
"  charms  "  (quotable  like  prices,  rates,  shares, 
[50] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

or  whatever,  the  things  they  dealt  in  down 
town)  are  two  distinct  categories;  the  safest 
thing  for  the  latter  being,  on  the  whole,  that 
it  might  include  the  former,  and  the  great 
strength  of  the  former  being  that  it  might 
perfectly  dispense  with  the  latter.  Mrs. 
Brack  was  not  refined,  not  the  least  little 
bit ;  but  what  would  be  the  case  with  Murray 
Brush  now — after  his  three  years  of  Europe  ? 
He  had  done  so  what  he  liked  with  her— 
which  had  seemed  so  then  just  the  mean 
ing,  hadn't  it?  of  their  being  "engaged" 
—that  he  had  made  her  not  see,  while  the 
absurdity  lasted  (the  absurdity  of  their  pre 
tending  to  believe  they  could  marry  without 
a  cent)  how  little  he  was  of  metal  without 
alloy :  this  had  come  up  for  her,  remarkably, 
but  afterwards — come  up  for  her  as  she 
looked  back.  Then  she  had  drawn  her 
conclusion,  which  was  one  of  the  many  that 
Basil  French  had  made  her  draw.  It  was  a 
queer  service  Basil  was  going  to  have  ren 
dered  her,  this  having  made  everything  she 
had  ever  done  impossible,  if  he  wasn't  going 
[Si] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

to  give  her  a  new  chance.  If  he  was  it  was 
doubtless  right  enough.  On  the  other  hand 
Murray  might  have  improved,  if  such  a 
quantity  of  alloy,  as  she  called  it,  were,  in 
any  man,  reducible,  and  if  Paris  were  the 
place  all  happily  to  reduce  it.  She  had  her 
doubts— anxious  and  aching  on  the  spot, 
and  had  expressed  them  to  Mr.  Pitman: 
certainly,  of  old,  he  had  been  more  open  to 
the  quotable  than  to  the  inexpressible,  to 
charms  than  to  charm.  If  she  could  try 
the  quotable,  however,  and  with  such  a 
grand  result,  on  Mrs.  Brack,  she  couldn't 
now  on  Murray — in  respect  to  whom  every 
thing  had  changed.  So  that  if  he  hadn't  a 
sense  for  the  subtler  appeal,  the  appeal  ap 
preciable  by  people  not  vulgar,  on  which 
alone  she  could  depend,  what  on  earth 
would  become  of  her  ?  She  could  but  yearn 
ingly  hope,  at  any  rate,  as  she  made  up  her 
mind  to  write  to  him  immediately  at  his 
club.  It  was  a  question  of  the  right  sensi 
bility  in  him.  Perhaps  he  would  have  ac 
quired  it  in  Europe. 

[52] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

Two  days  later  indeed — for  he  had  prompt 
ly  and  charmingly  replied,  keeping  with  alac 
rity  the  appointment  she  had  judged  best 
to  propose  for  a  morning  hour  in  a  seques 
tered  alley  of  the  Park — two  days  later  she 
was  to  be  struck  well-nigh  to  alarm  by  every 
thing  he  had  acquired:  so  much  it  seemed 
to  make  that  it  threatened  somehow  a  com 
plication,  and  her  plan,  so  far  as  she  had 
arrived  at  one,  dwelt  in  the  desire  above  all 
to  simplify.  She  wanted  no  grain  more  of 
extravagance  or  excess  of  anything — risk 
ing  as  she  had  done,  none  the  less,  a  recall  of 
ancient  license  in  proposing  to  Murray  such 
a  place  of  meeting.  She  had  her  reasons- 
she  wished  intensely  to  discriminate:  Basil 
French  had  several  times  waited  on  her  at 
her  mother's  habitation,  their  horrible  flat 
which  was  so  much  too  far  up  and  too  near 
the  East  Side ;  he  had  dined  there  and  lunched 
there  and  gone  with  her  thence  to  other 
places,  notably  to  see  pictures,  and  had  in 
particular  adjourned  with  her  twice  to  the 
Metropolitan  Museum,  in  which  he  took  a 

[53] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

great  interest,  in  which  she  professed  a  de 
light,  and  their  second  visit  to  which  had 
wound  up  in  her  encounter  with  Mr.  Pit 
man,  after  her  companion  had  yielded,  at 
her  urgent  instance,  to  an  exceptional  need 
of  keeping  a  business  engagement.  She 
mightn't,  in  delicacy,  in  decency,  entertain 
Murray  Brush  where  she  had  entertained 
Mr.  French — she  was  given  over  now  to 
these  exquisite  perceptions  and  proprieties 
and  bent  on  devoutly  observing  them;  and 
Mr.  French,  by  good-luck,  had  never  been 
with  her  in  the  Park:  partly  because  he  had 
never  pressed  it,  and  partly  because  she 
would  have  held  off  if  he  had,  so  haunted 
were  those  devious  paths  and  favoring 
shades  by  the  general  echo  of  her  untram 
melled  past.  If  he  had  never  suggested 
their  taking  a  turn  there  this  was  because, 
quite  divinably,  he  held  it  would  commit 
him  further  than  he  had  yet  gone;  and  if 
she  on  her  side  had  practised  a  like  reserve 
it  was  because  the  place  reeked  for  her,  as 
she  inwardly  said,  with  old  associations. 

[54] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

It  reeked  with  nothing  so  much  perhaps  as 
with  the  memories  evoked  by  the  young 
man  who  now  awaited  her  in  the  nook  she 
had  been  so  competent  to  indicate;  but  in 
what  corner  of  the  town,  should  she  look  for 
them,  wouldn't  those  footsteps  creak  back 
into  muffled  life,  and  to  what  expedient 
would  she  be  reduced  should  she  attempt 
to  avoid  all  such  tracks  ?  The  Museum  was 
full  of  tracks,  tracks  by  the  hundred — the 
way  really  she  had  knocked  about! — but 
she  had  to  see  people  somewhere,  and  she 
couldn't  pretend  to  dodge  every  ghost. 

All  she  could  do  was  not  to  make  con 
fusion,  make  mixtures,  of  the  living;  though 
she  asked  herself  enough  what  mixture  she 
mightn't  find  herself  to  have  prepared  if  Mr. 
French  should,  not  so  very  impossibly,  for 
a  restless,  roaming  man — her  effect  on  him! 
—happen  to  pass  while  she  sat  there  with  the 
mustachioed  personage  round  whose  name 
Mrs.  Maule  would  probably  have  caused  det 
rimental  anecdote  most  thickly  to  cluster. 
There  existed,  she  was  sure,  a  mass  of 

[55] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

luxuriant  legend  about  the  " lengths"  her 
engagement  with  Murray  Brush  had  gone; 
she  could  herself  fairly  feel  them  in  the  air, 
these  streamers  of  evil,  black  flags  flown  as 
in  warning,  the  vast  redundancy  of  so  cheap 
and  so  dingy  social  bunting,  in  fine,  that 
flapped  over  the  stations  she  had  successive 
ly  moved  away  from  and  which  were  empty 
now,  for  such  an  ado,  even  to  grotesqueness. 
The  vivacity  of  that  conviction  was  what 
had  at  present  determined  her,  while  it  was 
the  way  he  listened  after  she  had  quickly 
broken  ground,  while  it  was  the  special 
character  of  the  interested  look  in  his  hand 
some  face,  handsomer  than  ever  yet,  that 
represented  for  her  the  civilization  he  had 
somehow  taken  on.  Just  so  it  was  the  quan 
tity  of  that  gain,  in  its  turn,  that  had  at  the 
end  of  ten  minutes  begun  to  affect  her  as 
holding  up  a  light  to  the  wide  reach  of  her 
step.  "  There  was  never  anything  the  least 
serious  between  us,  not  a  sign  or  a  scrap, 
do  you  mind  ?  of  anything  beyond  the  merest 
pleasant  friendly  acquaintance;  and  if  you're 
[56] 


THERE  NEVER  WAS  ANYTHING   THE  LEAST  SERIOUS  BETWEEN   US' 


OF  THE 

E 

Of 


JULIA         BRIDE 

not  ready  to  go  to  the  stake  on  it  for  me  you 
may  as  well  know  in  time  what  it  is  you'll 
probably  cost  me." 

She  had  immediately  plunged,  measuring 
her  effect  and  having  thought  it  well  over; 
and  what  corresponded  to  her  question  of 
his  having  become  a  better  person  to  appeal 
to  was  the  appearance  of  interest  she  had  so 
easily  created  in  him.  She  felt  on  the  spot 
the  difference  that  made — it  was  indeed  his 
form  of  being  more  civilized :  it  was  the  sense 
in  which  Europe  in  general  and  Paris  in  par 
ticular  had  made  him  develop.  By  every 
calculation — and  her  calculations,  based  on 
the  intimacy  of  her  knowledge,  had  been 
many  and  deep — he  would  help  her  the  better 
the  more  intelligent  he  should  have  become ; 
yet  she  was  to  recognize  later  on  that  the 
first  chill  of  foreseen  disaster  had  been 
caught  by  her  as,  at  a  given  moment,  this 
greater  refinement  of  his  attention  seemed 
to  exhale  it.  It  was  just  what  she  had  want 
ed—  •"  if  I  can  only  get  him  interested — !"  so 
that,  this  proving  quite  vividly  possible, 

[57] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

why  did  the  light  it  lifted  strike  her  as  lurid  ? 
Was  it  partly  by  reason  of  his  inordinate 
romantic  good  looks,  those  of  a  gallant,  genial 
conqueror,  but  which,  involving  so  glossy 
a  brownness  of  eye,  so  manly  a  crispness  of 
curl,  so  red-lipped  a  radiance  of  smile,  so 
natural  a  bravery  of  port,  prescribed  to  any 
response  he  might  facially,  might  expressive 
ly,  make  a  sort  of  florid,  disproportionate 
amplitude?  The  explanation,  in  any  case, 
didn't  matter;  he  was  going  to  mean  well — 
that  she  could  feel,  and  also  that  he  had 
meant  better  in  the  past,  presumably,  than 
he  had  managed  to  convince  her  of  his  doing 
at  the  time:  the  oddity  she  hadn't  now 
reckoned  with  was  this  fact  that  from  the 
moment  he  did  advertise  an  interest  it 
should  show  almost  as  what  she  would  have 
called  weird.  It  made  a  change  in  him  that 
didn't  go  with  the  rest — as  if  he  had  broken 
his  nose  or  put  on  spectacles,  lost  his  hand 
some  hair  or  sacrificed  his  splendid  mustache : 
her  conception,  her  necessity,  as  she  saw, 
had  been  that  something  should  be  added  to 

[58] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

him  for  her  use,  but  nothing  for  his  own 
alteration. 

He  had  affirmed  himself,  and  his  char 
acter,  and  his  temper,  and  his  health,  and 
his  appetite,  and  his  ignorance,  and  his  ob 
stinacy,  and  his  whole  charming,  coarse, 
heartless  personality,  during  their  engage 
ment,  by  twenty  forms  of  natural  emphasis, 
but  never  by  emphasis  of  interest.  How 
in  fact  could  you  feel  interest  unless  you 
should  know,  within  you,  some  dim  stir  of 
imagination?  There  was  nothing  in  the 
world  of  which  Murray  Brush  was  less  ca 
pable  than  of  such  a  dim  stir,  because  you 
only  began  to  imagine  when  you  felt  some 
approach  to  a  need  to  understand.  He  had 
never  felt  it;  for  hadn't  he  been  born,  to  his 
personal  vision,  with  that  perfect  intuition 
of  everything  which  reduces  all  the  suggested 
preliminaries  of  judgment  to  the  imperti 
nence — when  it's  a  question  of  your  entering 
your  house — of  a  dumpage  of  bricks  at  your 
door?  He  had  had,  in  short,  neither  to 
imagine  nor  to  perceive,  because  he  had, 
[  59  J 


JULIA         BRIDE 

from  the  first  pulse  of  his  intelligence,  sim 
ply  and  supremely  known:  so  that,  at  this 
hour,  face  to  face  with  him,  it  came  over 
her  that  she  had,  in  their  old  relation,  dis 
pensed  with  any  such  convenience  of  com 
prehension  on  his  part  even  to  a  degree  she 
had  not  measured  at  the  time.  What  there 
fore  must  he  not  have  seemed  to  her  as  a 
form  of  life,  a  form  of  avidity  and  activity, 
blatantly  successful  in  its  own  conceit,  that 
he  could  have  dazzled  her  so  against  the 
interest  of  her  very  faculties  and  functions  ? 
Strangely  and  richly  historic  all  that  back 
ward  mystery,  and  only  leaving  for  her  mind 
the  wonder  of  such  a  mixture  of  possession 
and  detachment  as  they  would  clearly  to 
day  both  know.  For  each  to  be  so  little  at 
last  to  the  other  when,  during  months  to 
gether,  the  idea  of  all  abundance,  all  quan 
tity,  had  been,  for  each,  drawn  from  the 
other  and  addressed  to  the  other — what 
was  it  monstrously  like  but  some  fantastic 
act  of  getting  rid  of  a  person  by  going  to 
lock  yourself  up  in  the  sanctum  sanctorum 
[60] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

of  that  person's  house,  amid  every  evidence 
of  that  person's  habits  and  nature?  What 
was  going  to  happen,  at  any  rate,  was  that 
Murray  would  show  himself  as  beautifully 
and  consciously  understanding — and  it  would 
be  prodigious  that  Europe  should  have  in 
oculated  him  with  that  delicacy.  Yes,  he 
wouldn't  claim  to  know  now  till  she  had  told 
him — an  aid  to  performance  he  had  surely 
never  before  waited  for,  or  been  indebted  to, 
from  any  one;  and  then,  so  knowing,  he 
would  charmingly  endeavor  to  "meet,"  to 
oblige  and  to  gratify.  He  would  find  it, 
her  case,  ever  so  worthy  of  his  benevolence, 
and  would  be  literally  inspired  to  reflect 
that  he  must  hear  about  it  first. 

She  let  him  hear  then  everything,  in  spite 
of  feeling  herself  slip,  while  she  did  so,  to 
some  doom  as  yet  incalculable;  she  went  on 
very  much  as  she  had  done  for  Mr.  Pitman 
and  Mrs.  Brack,  with  the  rage  of  despera 
tion  and,  as  she  was  afterwards  to  call  it 
to  herself,  the  fascination  of  the  abyss.  She 
didn't  know,  couldn't  have  said  at  the  time, 
[61] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

why  his  projected  benevolence  should  have 
had  most  so  the  virtue  to  scare  her:  he  would 
patronize  her,  as  an  effect  of  her  vividness, 
if  not  of  her  charm,  and  would  do  this  with 
all  high  intention,  finding  her  case,  or  rather 
their  case,  their  funny  old  case,  taking  on  of 
a  sudden  such  refreshing  and  edifying  life, 
to  the  last  degree  curious  and  even  impor 
tant;  but  there  were  gaps  of  connection  be 
tween  this  and  the  intensity  of  the  percep 
tion  here  overtaking  her  that  she  shouldn't 
be  able  to  move  in  any  direction  without 
dishing  herself.  That  she  couldn't  afford  it 
where  she  had  got  to — couldn't  afford  the 
deplorable  vulgarity  of  having  been  so  many 
times  informally  affianced  and  contracted 
(putting  it  only  at  that,  at  its  being  by  the 
new  lights  and  fashions  so  unpardonably 
vulgar) :  he  took  this  from  her  without  turn 
ing,  as  she  might  have  said,  a  hair;  except 
just  to  indicate,  with  his  new  superiority, 
that  he  felt  the  distinguished  appeal  and 
notably  the  pathos  of  it.  He  still  took  it 
from  her  that  she  hoped  nothing,  as  it  were, 
[62] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

from  any  other  alibi — the  people  to  drag 
into  court  being  too  many  and  too  scattered ; 
but  that,  as  it  was  with  him,  Murray  Brush, 
she  had  been  most  vulgar,  most  everything 
she  had  better  not  have  been,  so  she  de 
pended  on  him  for  the  innocence  it  was  act 
ually  vital  she  should  establish.  He  flushed 
or  frowned  or  winced  no  more  at  that  than 
he  did  when  she  once  more  fairly  emptied 
her  satchel  and,  quite  as  if  they  had  been 
Nancy  and  the  Artful  Dodger,  or  some 
nefarious  pair  of  that  sort,  talking  things 
over  in  the  manner  of  Oliver  Twist,  re 
vealed  to  him  the  fondness  of  her  view 
that,  could  she  but  have  produced  a  cleaner 
slate,  she  might  by  this  time  have  pulled 
it  off  with  Mr.  French.  Yes,  he  let  her 
in  that  way  sacrifice  her  honorable  con 
nection  with  him — all  the  more  honorable 
for  being  so  completely  at  an  end — to  the 
crudity  of  her  plan  for  not  missing  an 
other  connection,  so  much  more  brilliant 
than  what  he  offered,  and  for  bringing 
another  man,  with  whom  she  so  invidiously 

[63] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

and  unflatteringly  compared  him,  into  her 
greedy  life. 

There  was  only  a  moment  during  which, 
by  a  particular  lustrous  look  she  had  never 
had  from  him  before,  he  just  made  her  won 
der  which  turn  he  was  going  to  take;  she 
felt,  however,  as  safe  as  was  consistent  with 
her  sense  of  having  probably  but  added  to 
her  danger,  when  he  brought  out,  the  next 
instant:  "  Don't  you  seem  to  take  the  ground 
that  we  were  guilty — that  you  were  ever 
guilty — of  something  we  shouldn't  have 
been  ?  What  did  we  ever  do  that  was  secret, 
or  underhand,  or  any  way  not  to  be  acknowl 
edged?  What  did  we  do  but  exchange  our 
young  vows  with  the  best  faith  in  the  world 
— publicly,  rejoicingly,  with  the  full  assent 
of  every  one  connected  with  us  ?  I  mean  of 
course,"  he  said  with  his  grave  kind  smile, 
11  till  we  broke  off  so  completely  because  we 
found  that — practically,  financially,  on  the 
hard  worldly  basis — we  couldn't  work  it. 
What  harm,  in  the  sight  of  God  or  man ,  Julia, ' ' 
he  asked  in  his  fine  rich  way,  "did  we  ever  do  ?" 
[64] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

She  gave  him  back  his  look,  turning  pale. 
"Am  I  talking  of  that?  Am  I  talking  of 
what  we  know?  I'm  talking  of  what  others 
feel — of  what  they  have  to  feel;  of  what  it's 
just  enough  for  them  to  know  not  to  be  able 
to  get  over  it,  once  they  do  really  know  it. 
How  do  they  know  what  didn't  pass  between 
tis,  with  all  the  opportunities  we  had  ? 
That's  none  of  their  business — if  we  were 
idiots  enough,  on  the  top  of  everything! 
What  you  may  or  mayn't  have  done  doesn't 
count,  for  you;  but  there  are  people  for 
whom  it's  loathsome  that  a  girl  should  have 
gone  on  like  that  from  one  person  to  another 
and  still  pretend  to  be — well,  all  that  a  nice 
girl  is  supposed  to  be.  It's  as  if  we  had  but 
just  waked  up,  mother  and  I,  to  such  a  re 
markable  prejudice;  and  now  we  have  it— 
when  we  could  do  so  well  without  it! — star 
ing  us  in  the  face.  That  mother  should 
have  insanely  let  me,  should  so  vulgarly 
have  taken  it  for  my  natural,  my  social 
career — that's  the  disgusting,  humiliating 
thing:  with  the  lovely  account  it  gives  of 


JULIA         BRIDE 

both  of  us!  But  mother's  view  of  a  delicacy 
in  things!"  she  went  on  with  scathing  grim- 
ness;  ''mother's  measure  of  anything,  with 
her  grand  '  gained  cases '  (there'll  be  another 
yet,  she  finds  them  so  easy!)  of  which  she's 
so  publicly  proud !  You  see  I' ve  no  margin , ' ' 
said  Julia;  letting  him  take  it  from  her 
flushed  face  as  much  as  he  would  that  her 
mother  hadn't  left  her  an  inch.  It  was 
that  he  should  make  use  of  the  spade  with 
her  for  the  restoration  of  a  bit  of  a  margin 
just  wide  enough  to  perch  on  till  the  tide 
of  peril  should  have  ebbed  a  little,  it  was 
that  he  should  give  her  that  lift — ! 

Well,  it  was  all  there  from  him  after  these 
last  words;  it  was  before  her  that  he  really 
took  hold.  "Oh,  my  dear  child,  I  can  see! 
Of  course  there  are  people — ideas  change 
in  our  society  so  fast! — who  are  not  in  sym 
pathy  with  the  old  American  freedom  and 
who  read,  I  dare  say,  all  sorts  of  uncanny 
things  into  it.  Naturally  you  must  take 
them  as  they  are — from  the  moment,"  said 
Murray  Brush,  wrho  had  lighted,  by  her  leave, 
[66] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

a  cigarette,  "your  life-path  does,  for  weal 
or  for  woe,  cross  with  theirs."  He  had 
every  now  and  then  such  an  elegant  phrase. 
"Awfully  interesting,  certainly,  your  case. 
It's  enough  for  me  that  it  is  yours — I  make 
it  my  own.  I  put  myself  absolutely  in 
your  place;  you'll  understand  from  me, 
without  professions,  won't  you?  that  I  do. 
Command  me  in  every  way!  What  I  do 
like  is  the  sympathy  with  which  you've  in 
spired  him.  I  don't,  I'm  sorry  to  say,  hap 
pen  to  know  him  personally "  —he  smoked 
away,  looking  off ;  "  but  of  course  one  knows 
all  about  him  generally,  and  I'm  sure  he's 
right  for  you,  I'm  sure  it  would  be  charming, 
if  you  yourself  think  so.  Therefore  trust 
me  and  even — what  shall  I  say? — leave  it 
to  me  a  little,  won't  you?"  He  had  been 
watching,  as  in  his  fumes,  the  fine  growth 
of  his  possibilities;  and  with  this  he  turned 
on  her  the  large  warmth  of  his  charity.  It 
was  like  a  subscription  of  a  half-a-million. 
"I'll  take  care  of  you." 

She  found  herself  for  a  moment  looking 


JULIA         BRIDE 

up  at  him  from  as  far  below  as  the  point 
from  which  the  school-child,  with  round 
eyes  raised  to  the  wall,  gazes  at  the  parti 
colored  map  of  the  world.  Yes,  it  was  a 
warmth,  it  was  a  special  benignity,  that 
had  never  yet  dropped  on  her  from  any  one ; 
and  she  wouldn't  for  the  first  few  moments 
have  known  how  to  describe  it  or  even 
quite  what  to  do  with  it.  Then,  as  it  still 
rested,  his  fine  improved  expression  aiding, 
the  sense  of  what  had  happened  came  over 
her  with  a  rush.  She  was  being,  yes,  pat 
ronized;  and  that  was  really  as  new  to  her 
—the  freeborn  American  girl  who  might,  if 
she  had  wished,  have  got  engaged  and  dis 
engaged  not  six  times  but  sixty — as  it  would 
have  been  to  be  crowned  or  crucified.  The 
Frenches  themselves  didn't  do  it  —  the 
Frenches  themselves  didn't  dare  it.  It  was 
as  strange  as  one  would:  she  recognized  it 
when  it  came,  but  anything  might  have  come 
rather — and  it  was  coming  by  (of  all  people 
in  the  world)  Murray  Brush!  It  over 
whelmed  her;  still  she  could  speak,  with 
[68] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

however  faint  a  quaver  and  however  sick  a 
smile.  "  You'll  lie  for  me  like  a  gentle 
man  ?" 

"As  far  as  that  goes  till  I'm  black  in  the 
face!"  And  then  while  he  glowed  at  her 
and  she  wondered  if  he  would  pointedly 
look  his  lies  that  way,  and  if,  in  fine,  his 
florid,  gallant,  knowing,  almost  winking 
intelligence,  common  as  she  had  never  seen 
the  common  vivified,  would  represent  his 
notion  of  " blackness":  "See  here,  Julia; 
I'll  do  more." 

"'More'—?" 

"Everything.  I'll  take  it  right  in  hand. 
I'll  fling  over  you— 

"Fling  over  me — ?"  she  continued  to 
echo  as  he  fascinatingly  fixed  her. 

"  Well,  the  biggest  kind  of  rose-colored 
mantle!"  And  this  time,  oh,  he  did  wink: 
it  would  be  the  way  he  was  going  to  wink 
(and  in  the  grandest  good  faith  in  the  world) 
when  indignantly  denying,  under  inquisi 
tion,  that  there  had  been  "  a  sign  or  a  scrap  " 
between  them.  But  there  was  more  to 
[69] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

come;  he  decided  she  should  have  it  all. 
"Julia,  you've  got  to  know  now."  He 
hung  fire  but  an  instant  more.  "Julia,  I'm 
going  to  be  married."  His  " Julias"  were 
somehow  death  to  her;  she  could  feel  that 
even  through  all  the  rest.  "Julia,  I  an 
nounce  my  engagement." 

"Oh,  lordy,  lordy!"  she  wailed:  it  might 
have  been  addressed  to  Mr.  Pitman. 

The  force  of  it  had  brought  her  to  her  feet, 
but  he  sat  there  smiling  up  as  at  the  natural 
tribute  of  her  interest.  "  I  tell  you  before 
any  one  else;  it's  not  to  be  ' out '  for  a  day  or 
two  yet.  But  we  want  you  to  know;  she 
said  that  as  soon  as  I  mentioned  to  her  that 
I  had  heard  from  you.  I  mention  to  her 
everything,  you  see!" — and  he  almost  sim 
pered  while,  still  in  his  seat,  he  held  the  end 
of  his  cigarette,  all  delicately  and  as  for  a 
form  of  gentle  emphasis,  with  the  tips  of 
his  fine  fingers.  "You've  not  met  her, 
Mary  Lindeck,  I  think:  she  tells  me  she 
hasn't  the  pleasure  of  knowing  you,  but  she 
desires  it  so  much — particularlv  longs  for 

[70] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

it.  She'll  take  an  interest  too,"  he  went  on; 
"  you  must  let  me  immediately  bring  her  to 
you.  She  has  heard  so  much  about  you 
and  she  really  wants  to  see  you." 

"Oh  mercy  me!"  poor  Julia  gasped  again 
— so  strangely  did  history  repeat  itself  and 
so  did  this  appear  the  echo,  on  Murray 
Brush's  lips,  and  quite  to  drollery,  of  that 
sympathetic  curiosity  of  Mrs.  Brack's  which 
Mr.  Pitman  had,  as  they  said,  voiced.  Well, 
there  had  played  before  her  the  vision  of  a 
ledge  of  safety  in  face  of  a  rising  tide;  but 
this  deepened  quickly  to  a  sense  more  for 
lorn,  the  cold  swish  of  waters  already  up  to 
her  waist  and  that  would  soon  be  up  to  her 
chin.  It  came  really  but  from  the  air  of  her 
friend,  from  the  perfect  benevolence  and 
high  unconsciousness  with  which  he  kept 
his  posture — as  if  to  show  he  could  patron 
ize  her  from  below  upward  quite  as  well  as 
from  above  down.  And  as  she  took  it  all  in, 
as  it  spread  to  a  flood,  with  the  great  lumps 
and  masses  of  truth  it  was  floating,  she 
knew  inevitable  submission,  not  to  say  sub- 


JULIA          BRIDE 

mersion,  as  she  had  never  known  it  in  her 
life;  going  down  and  down  before  it,  not 
even  putting  out  her  hands  to  resist  or  cling 
by  the  way,  only  reading  into  the  young 
man's  very  face  an  immense  fatality  and, 
for  all  his  bright  nobleness,  his  absence  of 
rancor  or  of  protesting  pride,  the  great  gray 
blankness  of  her  doom.  It  was  as  if  the 
earnest  Miss  Lindeck,  tall  and  mild,  high 
and  lean,  with  eye-glasses  and  a  big  nose, 
but  "  marked  "  in  a  noticeable  way,  elegant 
and  distinguished  and  refined,  as  you  could 
see  from  a  mile  off,  and  as  graceful,  for  com 
mon  despair  of  imitation,  as  the  curves  of 
the  "  copy  "  set  of  old  by  one's  writing-master 
— it  was  as  if  this  stately  well-wisher,  whom 
indeed  she  had  never  exchanged  a  word 
with,  but  whom  she  had  recognized  and 
placed  and  winced  at  as  soon  as  he  spoke  of 
her,  figured  there  beside  him  now  as  also  in 
portentous  charge  of  her  case. 

He  had  ushered  her  into  it  in  that  way, 
as  if  his  mere  right  word  sufficed;  and  Julia 
could  see  them  throne  together,  beautifully 
[72] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

at  one  in  all  the  interests  they  now  shared, 
and  regard  her  as  an  object  of  almost  tender 
solicitude.  It  was  positively  as  if  they  had 
become  engaged  for  her  good — in  such  a 
happy  light  as  it  shed.  That  was  the  way 
people  you  had  known,  known  a  bit  inti 
mately,  looked  at  you  as  soon  as  they  took 
on  the  high  matrimonial  propriety  that 
sponged  over  the  more  or  less  wild  past  to 
which  you  belonged  and  of  which,  all  of  a 
sudden,  they  were  aware  only  through  some 
suggestion  it  made  them  for  reminding  you 
definitely  that  you  still  had  a  place.  On 
her  having  had  a  day  or  two  before  to  meet 
Mrs.  Brack  and  to  rise  to  her  expectation 
she  had  seen  and  felt  herself  act,  had  above 
all  admired  herself,  and  had  at  any  rate 
known  what  she  said,  even  though  losing, 
at  her  altitude,  any  distinctness  in  the  oth 
ers.  She  could  have  repeated  later  on  the 
detail  of  her  performance — if  she  hadn't  pre 
ferred  to  keep  it  with  her  as  a  mere  locked- 
up,  a  mere  unhandled  treasure.  At  present, 
however,  as  everything  was  for  her  at  first 
[73] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

deadened  and  vague,  tine  to  the  general 
effect  of  sounds  and  motions  in  water,  she 
couldn't  have  said  afterwards  what  words 
she  spoke,  what  face  she  showed,  what  im 
pression  she  made — at  least  till  she  had 
pulled  herself  round  to  precautions.  She 
only  knew  she  had  turned  away,  and  that 
this  movement  must  have  sooner  or  later 
determined  his  rising  to  join  her,  his  decid 
ing  to  accept  it,  gracefully  and  condoningly 
— condoningly  in  respect  to  her  natural 
emotion,  her  inevitable  little  pang — for  an 
intimation  that  they  would  be  better  on 
their  feet. 

They  trod  then  afresh  their  ancient  paths ; 
and  though  it  pressed  upon  her  hatefully 
that  he  must  have  taken  her  abruptness  for 
a  smothered  shock,  the  flare-up  of  her  old 
feeling  at  the  breath  of  his  news,  she  had 
still  to  see  herself  condemned  to  allow  him 
this,  condemned  really  to  encourage  him 
in  the  mistake  of  believing  her  suspicious 
of  feminine  spite  and  doubtful  of  Miss  Lin- 
deck's  zeal.  She  was  so  far  from  doubtful 
[74] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

that  she  was  but  too  appalled  at  it  and  at 
the  officious  mass  in  which  it  loomed,  and 
this  instinct  of  dread,  before  their  walk  was 
over,  before  she  had  guided  him  round  to 
one  of  the  smaller  gates,  there  to  slip  off 
again  by  herself,  was  positively  to  find  on 
the  bosom  of  her  flood  a  plank  by  the  aid 
of  which  she  kept  in  a  manner  and  for  the 
time  afloat.  She  took  ten  minutes  to  pant, 
to  blow  gently,  to  paddle  disguisedly,  to 
accommodate  herself,  in  a  word,  to  the  ele 
ments  she  had  let  loose;  but  as  a  reward  of 
her  effort  at  least  she  then  saw  how  her  de 
termined  vision  accounted  for  everything. 
Beside  her  friend  on  the  bench  she  had  truly 
felt  all  his  cables  cut,  truly  swallowed  down 
the  fact  that  if  he  still  perceived  she  was 
pretty — and  how  pretty! — it  had  ceased  ap 
preciably  to  matter  to  him.  It  had  lighted 
the  folly  of  her  preliminary  fear,  the  fear  of 
his  even  yet  to  some  effect  of  confusion  or 
other  inconvenience  for  her,  proving  more 
alive  to  the  quotable  in  her,  as  she  had  called 
it,  than  to  the  inexpressible.  She  had  reck- 
[75] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

oned  with  the  awkwardness  of  that  possible 
failure  of  his  measure  of  her  charm,  by 
which  his  renewed  apprehension  of  her 
grosser  ornaments,  those  with  which  he  had 
most  affinity,  might  too  much  profit;  but 
she  need  have  concerned  herself  as  little  for 
his  sensibility  on  one  head  as  on  the  other. 
She  had  ceased  personally,  ceased  materi 
ally — in  respect,  as  who  should  say,  to  any 
optical  or  tactile  advantage — to  exist  for 
him,  and  the  whole  office  of  his  manner  had 
been  the  more  piously  and  gallantly  to  dress 
the  dead  presence  with  flowers.  This  was 
all  to  his  credit  and  his  honor,  but  what  it 
clearly  certified  was  that  their  case  was  at 
last  not  even  one  of  spirit  reaching  out  to 
spirit.  He  had  plenty  of  spirit — had  all  the 
spirit  required  for  his  having  engaged  him 
self  to  Miss  Lindeck,  into  which  result,  once 
she  had  got  her  head  well  up  again,  she  read, 
as  they  proceeded,  one  sharp  meaning  after 
another.  It  was  therefore  toward  the  subtler 
essence  of  that  mature  young  woman  alone 
that  he  was  occupied  in  stretching;  what 

[76] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

was  definite  to  him  about  Julia  Bride  being 
merely,  being  entirely — which  was  indeed 
thereby  quite  enough — -that  she  might  end 
by  scaling  her  worldly  height.  They  would 
push,  they  would  shove,  they  would  "  boost," 
they  would  arch  both  their  straight  backs 
as  pedestals  for  her  tiptoe;  and  at  the  same 
time,  by  some  sweet  prodigy  of  mechanics, 
she  would  pull  them  up  and  up  with  her. 

Wondrous  things  hovered  before  her  in 
the  course  of  this  walk;  her  consciousness 
had  become,  by  an  extraordinary  turn,  a 
music-box  in  which,  its  lid  well  down,  the 
most  remarkable  tunes  were  sounding.  It 
played  for  her  ear  alone,  and  the  lid,  as  she 
might  have  figured,  was  her  firm  plan  of  hold 
ing  out  till  she  got  home,  of  not  betraying 
—to  her  companion  at  least — the  extent 
to  which  she  was  demoralized.  To  see 
him  think  her  demoralized  by  mistrust 
of  the  sincerity  of  the  service  to  be  meddle- 
somely  rendered  her  by  his  future  wife- 
she  would  have  hurled  herself  publicly  into 
the  lake  there  at  their  side,  would  have 
[77] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

splashed,  .in  her  beautiful  clothes,  among 
the  frightened  swans,  rather  than  invite  him 
to  that  ineptitude.  Oh,  her  sincerity,  Mary 
Lindeck's — she  would  be  drenched  with  her 
sincerity,  and  she  would  be  drenched,  yes, 
with  his;  so  that,  from  inward  convulsion 
to  convulsion,  she  had,  before  they  reached 
their  gate,  pulled  up  in  the  path.  There 
was  something  her  head  had  been  full  of 
these  three  or  four  minutes,  the  intensest 
little  tune  of  the  music-box,  and  it  had  made 
its  way  to  her  lips  now;  belonging — for  all 
the  good  it  could  do  her! — to  the  two  or 
three  sorts  of  solicitude  she  might  properly 
express. 

"  I  hope  she  has  a  fortune,  if  you  don't 
mind  my  speaking  of  it :  I  mean  some  of  the 
money  we  didn't  in  our  time  have — and  that 
we  missed,  after  all,  in  our  poor  way  and 
for  what  we  then  wanted  of  it,  so  quite 
dreadfully." 

She  had  been  able  to  wreathe  it  in  a  grace 
quite  equal  to  any  he  himself  had  employed ; 
and  it  was  to  be  said  for  him  also  that  he 
[78] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

kept  up,  on  this,  the  standard.  "  Oh,  she's 
not,  thank  goodness,  at  all  badly  off,  poor 
dear.  We  shall  do  very  well.  How  sweet 
of  you  to  have  thought  of  it !  May  I  tell  her 
that  too?"  he  splendidly  glared.  Yes,  he 
glared — how  couldn't  he,  with  what  his 
mind  was  really  full  of  ?  But,  all  the  same, 
he  came  just  here,  by  her  vision,  nearer  than 
at  any  other  point  to  being  a  gentleman. 
He  came  quite  within  an  ace  of  it — with 
his  taking  from  her  thus  the  prescription 
of  humility  of  service,  his  consenting  to  act 
in  the  interest  of  her  avidity,  his  letting  her 
mount  that  way,  on  his  bowed  shoulders,  to 
the  success  in  which  he  could  suppose  she 
still  believed.  He  couldn't  know,  he  would 
never  know,  that  she  had  then  and  there 
ceased  to  believe  in  it — that  she  saw  as  clear 
as  the  sun  in  the  sky  the  exact  manner  in 
which,  between  them,  before  they  had  done, 
the  Murray  Brushes,  all  zeal  and  sincerity, 
all  interest  in  her  interesting  case,  would 
dish,  would  ruin,  would  utterly  destroy  her. 
He  wouldn't  have  needed  to  go  on,  for  the 
[79] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

force  and  truth  of  this;  but  he  did  go  on— 
he  was  as  crashingly  consistent  as  a  motor 
car  without  a  brake.  He  was  visibly  in  love 
with  the  idea  of  what  they  might  do  for  her 
and  of  the  rare  "  social "  opportunity  that 
they  would,  by  the  same  stroke,  embrace. 
How  he  had  been  offhand  with  it,  how  he 
had  made  it  parenthetic,  that  he  didn't 
happen  "personally"  to  know  Basil  French 
—as  if  it  would  have  been  at  all  likely  he 
should  know  him,  even  impersonally,  and 
as  if  he  could  conceal  from  her  the  fact  that, 
since  she  had  made  him  her  overture,  this 
gentleman's  name  supremely  baited  her 
hook!  Oh,  they  would  help  Julia  Bride  if 
they  could — they  would  do  their  remarkable 
best ;  but  they  would  at  any  rate  have  made 
his  acquaintance  over  it,  and  she  might  in 
deed  leave  the  rest  to  their  thoroughness. 
He  would  already  have  known,  he  would 
already  have  heard;  her  appeal,  she  was 
more  and  more  sure,  wouldn't  have  come 
to  him  as  a  revelation.  He  had  already 
talked  it  over  with  her,  with  Miss  Lindeck, 
[80] 


JULIA          BRIDE 

to  whom  the  Frenches,  in  their  fortress,  had 
never  been  accessible,  and  his  whole  attitude 
bristled,  to  Julia's  eyes,  with  the  betrayal 
of  her  hand,  her  voice,  her  pressure,  her  cal 
culation.  His  tone  in  fact,  as  he  talked, 
fairly  thrust  these  things  into  her  face. 
"  But  you  must  see  her  for  yourself.  You'll 
judge  her.  You'll  love  her.  My  dear  child  " 
—he  brought  it  all  out,  and  if  he  spoke  of 
children  he  might,  in  his  candor,  have  been 
himself  infantine—  •"  my  dear  child,  she's  the 
person  to  do  it  for  you.  Make  it  over  to 
her;  but,"  he  laughed,  "of  course  see  her 
first !  Couldn't  you, ' '  he  wound  up — for  they 
were  now  near  their  gate,  where  she  was  to 
leave  him—  •"  couldn't  you  just  simply  make 
us  meet  him,  at  tea  say,  informally;  just  us 
alone,  as  pleasant  old  friends  of  whom  you'd 
have  so  naturally  and  frankly  spoken  to 
him:  and  then  see  what  we'd  make  of  that  ?" 
It  was  all  in  his  expression;  he  couldn't 
keep  it  out  of  that,  and  his  shining  good 
looks  couldn't:  ah  he  was  so  fatally  much 
too  handsome  for  her!  So  the  gap  showed 
[81] 


JULIA         BRIDE 

just  there,  in  his  admirable  mask  and  his 
admirable  eagerness;  the  yawning  little 
chasm  showed  where  the  gentleman  fell 
short.  But  she  took  this  in,  she  took  every 
thing  in,  she  felt  herself  do  it,  she  heard  her 
self  say,  while  they  paused  before  separation 
that  she  quite  saw  the  point  of  the  meeting, 
as  he  suggested,  at  her  tea.  She  would 
propose  it  to  Mr.  French  and  would  let 
them  know;  and  he  must  assuredly  bring 
Miss  Lindeck,  bring  her  "right  away," 
bring  her  soon,  bring  them,  his  fiancee  and 
her,  together  somehow,  and  as  quickly  as 
possible — so  that  they  should  be  old  friends 
before  the  tea.  She  would  propose  it  to  Mr. 
French,  propose  it  to  Mr.  French:  that 
hummed  in  her  ears  as  she  went — after  she 
had  really  got  away;  hummed  as  if  she  were 
repeating  it  over,  giving  it  out  to  the  passers, 
to  the  pavement,  to  the  sky,  and  all  as  in 
wild  discord  with  the  intense  little  concert 
of  her  music-box.  The  extraordinary  thing 
too  was  that  she  quite  believed  she  should 
do  it,  and  fully  meant  to;  desperately,  fan- 
[82] 


SHE     YIELDED     TO     THE     BITTERNESS 


JULIA         BRIDE 

tastically  passive — since  she  almost  reeled 
with  it  as  she  proceeded — she  was  capable 
of  proposing  anything  to  any  one:  capable 
too  of  thinking  it  likely  Mr.  French  would 
come,  for  he  had  never  on  her  previous  pro 
posals  declined  anything.  Yes,  she  would 
keep  it  up  to  the  end,  this  pretence  of  owing 
them  salvation,  and  might  even  live  to  take 
comfort  in  having  done  for  them  what  they 
wanted.  What  they  wanted  couldn't  but 
be  to  get  at  the  Frenches,  and  what  Miss 
Lindeck  above  all  wanted,  baffled  of  it  other 
wise,  with  so  many  others  of  the  baffled, 
was  to  get  at  Mr.  French — for  all  Mr.  French 
would  want  of  either  of  them! — still  more 
than  Murray  did.  It  was  not  till  after  she 
had  got  home,  got  straight  into  her  own 
room  and  flung  herself  on  her  face,  that  she 
yielded  to  the  full  taste  of  the  bitterness  of 
missing  a  connection,  missing  the  man  him 
self,  with  power  to  create  such  a  social  appe 
tite,  such  a  grab  at  what  might  be  gained 
by  them.  He  could  make  people,  even  peo 
ple  like  these  two  and  whom  there  were  still 


JULIA         BRIDE 

other  people  to  envy,  he  could  make  them 
push  and  snatch  and  scramble  like  that — 
and  then  remain  as  incapable  of  taking  her 
from  the  hands  of  such  patrons  as  of  re 
ceiving  her  straight,  say,  from  those  of  Mrs. 
Brack.  It  was  a  high  note,  too,  of  Julia's 
wonderful  composition  that,  even  in  the  long, 
lonely  moan  of  her  conviction  of  her  now 
certain  ruin,  all  this  grim  lucidity,  the  per 
fect  clearance  of  passion,  but  made  her  su 
premely  proud  of  him. 


THE    END 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 
LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


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LOAN  utr 

MUG  #0  tggQ 

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RSC'D  LD 

Dueen^^'WlMftR1 
subject  to  recall  after  4- 


LD  21A-50m-9,'58 
(6889slO)476B 


General  Library 
University  of  California 
'    Berkley 


190797 


